Video: Instantiated Turing machine

The Turing machine, first described in Alan Turing's classic paper "On Computable Numbers", is a seminal thought experiment that led directly to the machine you're currently using to read this. The Turing machine was never really meant to be built, but now some guy (not an academic, from what I can tell) has gone and built one, and it's capable of performing actual computations. Awesome.



Note: I've discussed Turing (once) before, and noted he had some daft ideas...

Pictures: Fun with robots

One of my favorite regular online activities is looking at The Boston Globe's Big Picture, a photographic blog showcasing beautiful high-quality images about a wide-range of topics. The most recently released set is on robots -- I highly recommend both The Big Picture and this series of photographs. My favorite picture:

Description: "Twendy-One demonstrates its ability to hold delicate objects by manipulating a drinking straw between its fingers at the Department of Mechanical Engineering laboratory in Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2009. The sophisticated robot has been developed by the university's team, led by Dr. Shigeki Sugano, in hope of supporting people in aging societies. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi)"

AI has a long way to go

The 2008 Loebner Prize - awarded yearly to the chatbot that comes closest to passing a restricted Turing test - has been awarded to Elbot. Elbot, created by Fred Roberts of Artificial Solutions, managed to fool 3 of the 12 judges which, at 25%, is the best performance in the history of the prize. I recommend chatting to the bot yourself for a while because you'll soon see that, frankly, it's pretty damn bad: it gives generic answers to specific questions, tries (and fails) to be funny, reeks of canned responses, has very limited conversational memory, has almost no general knowledge and is very easily confused. Elbot, in other words, is all artificial and no intelligence.

It's important to note that the Loebner prize is in fact very controversial and widely dismissed in the academic community. Indeed, many critics think that its design is flawed and Marvin Minsky has called it "obnoxious and stupid". Even the congenial Dan Dennett has criticized the prize harshly.

Incidentally, I hadn't previously read the paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," in which Turing sets out his celebrated test. I have to point out that portions of it are deeply silly, especially (but by no means solely) the bit where Turing endorses ESP...

(See also: New Scientist's piece).

Video: South Africa's robotic medical couriers

Hooray for South Africa's necessity, it's mothered another (very cool) invention: robotic medical couriers. In the video embedded below (or click here) New Scientist explains how modified military drones are being tested to see if they can effectively transport spit, blood or other medical samples from remote rural clinics to urban laboratories. See also New Scientist's article on the couriers.

Video: Robot solves the Rubik's cube

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords. (Embedded below, or click here).

Video: Robot with a rat brain

This is the single coolest thing I've seen in a while: