Hasta La Gadget!

The Java code which saw action in last year’s Angry Birds artificial intelligence competition is no longer some sort of secret stashed away on the cloud or on someone’s hard drive, as it has been released into the wild. Wait a minute here, did we miss something? What do you mean by an Angry Birds artificial intelligence competition? Well, that was a tournament organized by the Australian National University’s Artificial Intelligence Group, where they decided that Angry Birds from Rovio would be the perfect game to test just how far artificial intelligence have come, as it takes plenty of smarts to squash those green, bloated pigs in the game and to score three stars for every level.

There will be a new competition in the same vein this year, although it will happen in Beijing this coming August. Those who feel that they have the necessary smarts required to come up with the perfect pig-squashing algorithm can place last year’s code into action by downloading and installing it, making modifications from there if you think that you can do better.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: SEGA Dreamcast Backpack Will Retail For $146 Starting April 25 In Japan, Video Game Therapy Used To Help Treat Kids With Chronic Pain,

Everybody’s favorite clue-guessing computer Watson was always destined for more than just trouncing meatbags on Jeopardy. And though it spent a little of its time just hanging out and learning how to swear, Watson has now moved on to bigger and better things. “Dr”. Watson’s taking patients now, through a cloud-based medical application. More »

Computers can do practically anything these days, but they’re still a far cry from robotic brains that don’t just do what they’re told but actually think for themselves. The Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, or Spaun, is one of those, and it’s creeping up on human intelligence. More »

Robots come in many flavors. There’s the subservient kind, the virtual representative, the odd one with an artistic bent, and even robo-cattle. But, typically, they all hit the same roadblock: they can only do what they are programmed to do. Of course, there are those that posses some AI smarts, too, but Georgia Tech wants to take this to the next level, and build a ‘bot that can interact with its environment on the fly. The project hopes to give machines deployed in disaster situations the ability to find objects in their environment for use as tools, such as placing a chair to reach something high, or building bridges from debris. The idea builds on previous work where robots learned to moved objects out of their way, and developing an algorithm that allows them to identify items, and asses its usefulness as a tool. This would be backed up by some programming, to give the droids a basic understanding of rigid body mechanics, and how to construct motion plans. The Office of Navy Research‘s interest comes from potential future applications, working side-by-side with military personnel out on missions, which along with iRobot 110, forms the early foundations for the cyber army of our childhood imaginations.

Filed under: Robots, Alt

Georgia Tech receives $900,000 grant from Office of Naval Research to develop ‘MacGyver’ robot originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Oct 2012 10:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Those looking for a juxtaposition of IBM’s past and future needn’t look much further than two bits of news out of the company this week. The first comes with IBM’s announcement of its new zEnterprise EC12 25 mainframe server — a class of computer that may be a thing of the past in some places, but which still serves a fairly broad range of companies. In addition to an appearance that lives up to the “mainframe” moniker, this one promises 25 percent more performance per core than its predecessor and 50 percent more capacity. The second bit of news involves Watson, the company’s AI effort that rose to fame on Jeopardy! and has since gone on to find a number of new roles. As Bloomberg reports, one of its next steps may be to take on Siri in the smartphone space. While there’s no indication of a broader consumer product, IBM sees a range of possible applications for a mobile Watson in business and enterprise — even, for instance, giving farmers the ability to ask when they should plant their crops. Before that happens, though, IBM says it needs to give Watson more “senses” in order to respond to real-world input like image recognition — not to mention learn all it can about any given subject.

Filed under: Misc, Mobile

IBM debuts new mainframe computer as it eyes a more mobile Watson originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Aug 2012 12:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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