22 Sep 2009
The atmosphere ringed on for ages, with purple-green horizons staring back at me. And the eyes grew from deep within the trees. I knew I was there, at the right place, at the right time.
I wandered around the tree, one that would be cut down in the following months. I heard sounds of acoustic guitars rattling by near my head; while the bass drum, suspended in mid-air, bang swiftly to the rhythm of drum and bass.
The climbing plants created envelopes around me, and the canvas was covered, bloodshed. I new it was the place, but was it the time? I felt the grass whispering to my feet, don’t strangle me please, don’t kill me. And the buzzing of the birds, and the tweeting of bees, it rang through my brain, tormenting.
It was all going to fast, I could barely understand. It might be the time, but it might not be the place.
And I turned to the tree again, shivering. Icicles formed on the branches of the climbing plants. I was sweltering in the 40ºC mid-day heat. The sky turned orange, then purple again. I did not understand, I felt the violins scream around me. Or they might have been guitars, squelching at incredible speeds. Key change.
I touched the tree, as it slowly faded away into dreams, dreams of a past taken away from me, dreams of a photograph erased, dreams from a lost post, dreams from a memory.
13 Sep 2009
You may have heard of (or seen) HONDA’s humanoid robot ASIMO before. ASIMO stands for “Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility” although many would argue that it is in reverence to Isaac Asimov. Currently over 100 units exist, and each costs about 1 million USD.
It has been featured in many different shows, including CES, amongst others. Many believe ASIMO to be a step forward in the progress of true AI. I have read comments on forums and on the videos themselves of people who are alarmed that they would one day take over the world. There are concerned people voicing their thoughts on humans playing god.
All of this has been going on for decades. Some of us look for answers to our creation, wanting to explore the duplication of our processes, and genuinely believing that our mind is composed of algorithms that can be replicated into a machine that can be said to be intelligent. Some of us hate the fact that we are trying to recreate life, and composed others based on our intelligence, stating that it is immoral.
Well, for those of you who are scared about your safety: Robots won’t take over the earth, nor will they turn evil as pictured in the film “I, Robot”. However I do believe the age is coming in which the creations of the imagination and creativity of science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov’s are turning into real life events. And I do believe that some day it might be possible that they could in turn right their own viruses, spyware, spam the whole internet, conduct highly specialised cracking attacks, amongst other things.
I mean, computer programs can already compile and recompile themselves, as several professional adware programmers have shown in the past. It is only a matter of time before the creation of the spark that will give life to a rational being, one that can act not only for the wellbeing of others, but for it’s own wellbeing. One that can induce creative thoughts, and produce creative output.
That will be an age in which a computer will be able to effectively upload it’s code to the web, allowing expansion over the net, replication in different programming languages, and collaboration of thousands of millions of bots infesting supercomputer clusters.
However, back to earth, back to the 21st century. I found 3 really impressive videos of ASIMO that I would like to share with you. Voice your comments back to me if it causes any interest.
A rundown on ASIMO’s main features:
ASIMO coordination intelligence and interaction with other ASIMO’s:
ASIMO conducts the Detroit Symphony Orchestra:
11 Sep 2009
Toyota’s robot can speed-walk. OK, maybe this is not related directly to AI but more with Robotics, however AI is required to judge starting, running, where to stop, how to stop, and how to recover balance from a slight push. Hence my reason to post this here.
Integrate this with camera’s, inflared sensors, stereo microphones, speakers, motion detectors, and give it a little spark of memory, a sense of direction, and a wireless internet connection. This could be unstoppable. We’re definitively getting there, slowly, but marching on.
11 Sep 2009
I came across with an interesting video today that displays experimental use of a bunch of tools this organisation has developed, which aid students and researchers with AI studies and experiments. The website is aispace.org, check out the video below:
10 Sep 2009
Language is beautiful. It is one of the easiest methods of communicating something lengthy. As one may know, images express a thousand words, film may even express more, but both are ineffective when it comes to communicating something fast and immediately to someone (unless you have a polaroid of course).
English, particularly, is much more complex than I thought. As you may already know, I am rather _into _AI. One of the fields of AI is Natural Language Processing which involves speech recognition, syntactic and semantic organisation, separating words into parts of speech, language understanding, and finally speech generation, amongst others.
I genuinely used to believe there were only 8 parts of speech in English: Verbs, Adverbs, Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, Preopsitions, Conjunctions and Interjections. I stand corrected by Wikipedia. There are about 17 different types if we classify them correctly.
The open word classes:
- Adjectives
- Adverbs
- Interjections
- Nouns
- Verbs (except auxilliary verbs)
According to Wikipedia, “an open class (or open word class) is a word class that accepts the addition of new items, through such processes as compounding, derivation, coining, borrowing, etc.”
The closed word classes:
- Auxiliary verbs
- Clitics
- Coverbs
- Conjunctions
- Determiners (articles, quantifiers, demonstrative adjectives, and possessive adjectives)
- Particles
- Measure words
- Adpositions (prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions)
- Preverbs
- Pronouns
- Contractions
- Cardinal numbers
According to Wikipedia, “a closed class (or closed word class) is a word class to which no new items can normally be added, and that usually contains a relatively small number of items.”
Now, I was not aware of such classification, but this for sure must have an impact on language parsers. I am currently starting to write my first Language Parser, and thought I would start out with an SQL dictionary structure. I will be posting my findings in this blog as I get along with this.