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Risto Miikkulainen, a professor of computer science and neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin, was among the BotPrize participants who tried to concoct just the right mix of human and machine. When coding a bot for this year's contest, Miikkulainen and his team designed the bot to learn quickly. "When humans play games, they adapt very quickly," he says, "so in creating a bot, you can't aim to be 100% accurate, because adaptation is inexact."
The BotPrize is an attempt not only to improve game technology, but also to foster innovations outside the industry, from AI used in emergency training simulations today to the companion robots of the future. "You need some way to measure milestones in AI research," says Robert Epstein, creator and former director of the annual Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence, which involves a conventional Turing test. "So when you arrange contests like the BotPrize, you have a way of knowing whether we reached a milestone."
Will Wright, creator of best-selling simulation games such as The Sims and Spore, hopes the BotPrize encourages AI researchers to pursue the most elusively human quality of all: emotion. "Machine interactions are becoming a ubiquitous part of our environment, but they're not necessarily the most satisfying," Wright says, "so acknowledging our emotional dimension is an interesting task to go for in AI."
This means developing bots that not only fool people but also move them emotionally. "You want to build an emotional model for the agent you're competing with," Wright says. "It's not just about having an accurate aim. It's about creating a bot that simulates a victory dance above your dead corpse."
Once the province of hackers, gaming has grown into a thriving field of research.
Ok, so if I'm understanding this correctly, the bot needed to get 80% of the judges to choose it over 1 other human opponent? So if the bot looked exactly like a player the judge would in fact have completely guess between the 2, giving a 50% chance to get chosen, a whole 30% less then the number to win.
A better test would be to have 22 players and the 10 bots, and then have the judges be part of the 22 players. At the end of a set of games the judges pick 10 names of those they believed were the bots. Even though this is also not perfect, it is a lot better then an exactly human bot having still a 30% differential from the needed 80% to win
In it's current incarnation it's a complete bogus competition that means nothing.
edit:
sorry, it's a competition where the lack of a winner or being the winner means nothing because the judging is horrible. I am in full support of AI competitions though!
In fact the judges were able to nominate both players as human if they wished - that is they were not forced to choose, so your calculation is not correct. In 2008 3 of 5 humans passed the test, in 2009 only one did. In both years, the humans were judged to be much more human than the bots.
But you do have point. It might be possible to improve the format.
This is exactly what we need. It should be a 50-50 test environment. As for the military, ya they need some guidelines. It is time for a treaty among nations regarding the use of killer technology. From Daisy Cutters and White Phosphorous (Willy Pete) to autonomous killer robots and missile launch platforms. We need to decide again the rules of war. Or better yet how about no war?
Let's all just decide to not have wars? What a fantastic idea! I can't believe that no one in the last 15,000 years has thought of that!
Yep, world peace is surely right around the corner now.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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92 Comments
Bad Plan
A new movie just came out and I saw it last night. It's premise is that a very nice scientist with very good intentions creates AI for a robotic system that creates it's own robots. The military gets their hands on it and promptly uses it to destroy all living things on the planet. Similar to the Terminator scenario. The fools! The damnable fools!
Unrealistic? Well, the military weaponizing AI robots as we speak, and working on making them completely autonomous.
Oh well... Life had a good run on this planet while it lasted.
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