Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 226

Yesterday Microsoft launched its teen girl 'Tay' Twitter AI. It's designed to interact with followers and become smarter for it, so naturally it was doomed to fail. Within 24 hours, the Internet transformed it into a pro-Hitler sex robot, as the Internet is wont to do.

The tweets in question are deleted now, but screencaps like those below give you a healthy idea of what occurred. Warning: they're not for the easily offended.

Since this happened, Tay temporarily went offline, so Microsoft could "make adjustments." A cursory look through her current feed shows nothing out of the ordinary, so the situation is under control...for now.

Google parent company Alphabet Inc. have decided its robotics outfit Boston Dynamics isn't likely to produce marketable products anytime soon and as such, have put it up for sale, two sources familiar with the matter say.

The rumor is in line with accidentally leaked e-mails which indicate Google's concern with the viability of the company. The public reaction to the Atlas robot revealed last month could be a factor in the decision as well; the e-mails do well to show Google's worry.

"There's excitement from the tech press, but we're also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans' jobs," wrote Courtney Hohne, a director of communications at Google and the spokeswoman for advanced research group Google X.

The AlphaGo AI created by Google's DeepMind division yesterday lost its first Go match to world champion Lee Sedol in a five-game series. Commentator Song Taegon remarked that Sedol had developed a better understanding of his opponent, making for a highly anticipated game 5. Sedol was beaten again, although it seems to have been a much tighter game, with commentators going back and forth right until the end about who was on top.

"It was difficult to say at what point AlphaGo was ahead or behind," said Michael Redmond, 9-dan, American commentator. "A close game throughout. AlphaGo made what looked like a mistake with move 48, similar to the mistake in Game Four in the middle of the board. After that AlphaGo played very well in the middle of the board, and the game developed into a long, very difficult end game."

Microsoft is turning to a very interesting platform to help improve research in artificial intelligence. Minecraft is being used by researchers at Microsoft, and by select academic researchers through a private beta program, in its unstructured mode, as a sort of testing ground for testing AI theories and programming.

Now how would they go about doing that? The AIX platform which is being developed by a Microsoft lab in Cambridge, U.K., that they're using can potentially be programmed to learn in a similar and, well, general way that humans do, to program the Minecraft avatar to go forth and do stuff. It's a closed environment where researchers can look easily observe what the character is doing, and in a safe environment. The constructible world allows for a number of different variables that let them test in a lot of different conditions. All without actually sacrificing real, and expensive, robots.

"Minecraft is the perfect platform for this kind of research because it's this very open world," Katja Hofmann, the platforms developer, said. "You can do survival mode, you can do 'build battles' with your friends, you can do courses, you can implement our own games. This is really exciting for artificial intelligence because it allows us to create games that stretch beyond current abilities." Even trying to get your character to do simple tasks, like walking, is very beneficial to AI research.

After dominating the five-game Go tournament series 3-0 and looking invincible in the process, Google's DeepMind AI has finally fallen to its human opponent; world Go champion Lee Sedol made the series 3-1 over the weekend after seeing weaknesses in Deepmind's game and mounting a surprising comeback. The match was described as "long and complicated."

The fifth and final match will begin late tonight or early tomorrow morning depending where you live, and can be viewed here. It's highly anticipated, and for good reason.

"It seems Lee Sedol can now read AlphaGo better and has a better understanding of how AlphaGo moves," said Song Taegon, 9-dan, Korean commentator. "For the fifth match, it will be a far closer battle than before since [they] know each better."

Yesterday, Google's DeepMind AI took the first game against Go world champion Lee Sedol, to the shock of many. You might think it's just one game and Sedol could just as well come back to trounce 4-1, but today DeepMind did it again, putting itself up 2-0. Sedol, who after yesterday's loss commented he was still very confident he could beat the AI, is now very much on the backfoot.

"Yesterday I was surprised but today it's more than that - I am speechless," Lee remarked after the game. "I admit that it was a very clear loss on my part. From the very beginning of the game I did not feel like there was a point that I was leading."

DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis said the AI was confident in victory from the midway point onward.

Back in January, Google's DeepMind AI beat the European champion of the complex board game Go, marking a major achievement for AI. Today -- or yesterday, depending where you are in the world -- began the matchup against world champion Lee Sedol, widely regarded as significantly more skilled than the previous opponent Fan Hui.

To the surprise of even the commentators, DeepMind took the first game of the five game series, which will play out over the next few days. While it's just one game, it proves DeepMind can hang with the best of the best -- all the more impressive given it was projected to not be able to even beat the European champion for another decade.

Astronaut Scott Kelly returned from his year in space mission yesterday, which NASA is commemorating with a look at his achievements during the long voyage.

To say the least, it was a very social voyage, with Kelly hosting the first NASA TweetChat, Tumblr AnswerTime, and Reddit AMA from space. He also Instagrammed the whole time at the President's request. Obama was also sure to give him a warm welcome on his return home.

Non-social achievements for Kelly: harvesting lettuce and zinnia flowers in the VEGGIE facility, the latter of which will assist scientists for deep-space missions and the upcoming Mars mission.

Someone has integrated an actual, working electrocardiogram onto a small business card. You heard right, a company called MobilECG has done something startlingly clever, giving the diagnostic power to everyone. And it's an open-source design that anyone can play with.

The card uses sensors built into it that measure the electrical signals created by the heart through your thumbs. It's not quite the most accurate way to do it, but as a first-line diagnostic tool when you're not quite feeling well, it might be a life-saver. A blog post from the company says that it should be accurate enough to provide cursory information from the P, Q, R, S and the T waves to prompt people to go to the hospital.

The innovation coming from different startups for integrated and smaller technology is just astounding. Just imagine where medical devices can go if something like this is just on the boundary of our imagination. At the moment, they're gauging interest in their product, and you can request one if you'd like. They'll sell you one for $29, or less if more people start showing interest.

The AI revolution continues, with a team of Stanford researchers creating a new way of teaching AI systems how to predict a human's response to their actions.

The system is called Augur, which provides access to an online writing community called Wattpad, and its archive of over 600,000 stories. The information in these stories will enable support for vector machines - which are learning algorithms at their core - and will allow AI to better predict what people do in certain situations.

The researchers wrote in their study: "Over many millions of words, these mundane patterns [of people's reactions] are far more common than their dramatic counterparts. Characters in modern fiction turn on the lights after entering rooms; they react to compliments by blushing; they do not answer their phones when they are in meetings".

Google's Boston Dynamics has an impressive new version of its Atlas robot on display in the video below, which gives off a pretty strong AT-AT vibe. In it, you can see Atlas open doors, walk through rocky, snowy terrain, pick up and move boxes, and get up again when it gets knocked down. Pretty impressive, especially considering this failure at last year's DARPA Robotics Challenge.

As for the source of its mystical robot powers, it features articulated, sensate hands, and an articulated sensor head with stereo cameras and laser range finder.

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have made a pretty startling discovering, finally figuring out just how large a capacity our brain actually has when put in normal computing terms. With the help of GPU computing they figured out that we can store around one petabyte, which is nearly 10 times larger than what we originally thought.

Modeling the full function of the brain isn't easy, and even with clusters of GPU powerhouse servers it takes time to properly model the actual function of the connection between neurons, the synapses. The team of researchers modeled the full hippocampus of a rat with startling accuracy and 26 different sizes of synapses. Size matters, apparently, and the bigger the more storage the accompanying neurons have. They found that the average amount of information that can be held in one synapse is around 4.7 bits, far more than we thought previously.

The amount of information stored and transferred across those still misunderstood synapses doesn't translate directly to computing terms, however. We obviously don't store our moving memories as GIF's or even H.265 encoded MPEG's either. In fact, our brain is incredibly efficient, moving information across the synapse at a rate of around 10-20% of the time.

Up until now, the Hubble Space Telescope was the one that was looking to the utter edges of the universe, taking a few photos and blowing the world away each time. Well, NASA could retire Hubble very soon with its new WFIRST telescope.

The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (or WFIRST) has a field of view 100x larger than Hubble, and it's designed to block the glare from individual stars, which will make NASA's job of finding the chemical makeup of exoplanets easier. NASA won't launch WFIRST until the mid-2020s, so we should see the James Webb telescope that will be finished in 2018 be the champion until at around 2025 or so.

Once NASA has WFIRST online, it will provide a view of space that we've never seen before. NASA should be better capable of understanding the shape of the universe, as well as provide the US space agency with more insight into how dark energy and dark matter work, which could solve some very big problems and mysteries we have here on Earth.

MWC 2016 - LG has just unveiled its new, and very interesting Rolling Ball, at Mobile World Congress. LG worked with drone maker Parrot on the Rolling Ball, which looks like BB-8 from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

LG's new Rolling Ball works with the company's new G5 smartphone and turns it into a remote that can control the Rolling Ball from anywhere in the world. It features an on-board camera that records footage, but it's also a speaker that lets you speak through it - like, to your pet. LG's Rolling Ball also includes an IR blaster that lets you turn your TV on, from your smartphone, through the Rolling Ball.

The hardware powering the LG Rolling Ball are found in the center stripe, with the two large hemispheres are the engine that turns the robot in any direction. LG isn't talking about the price on the Rolling Ball just yet, but we should find out in the near future.

It's not unusual these days to find evidence of new world's hanging out beyond our solar-system. The original Kepler project found thousands of candidates that are still being confirmed as potential exo-planets. But finding nearly visible evidence of a planet being formed in the presence of the harsh conditions of a binary star system? That doesn't come along every day.

Just 450 light-years away, shining brightly in the constellation Taurus, the HD 132527 star system just birthed a new planet, and it's been caught in some stunning high-resolution photos from both the Hubble telescope in the past and now from the Atcama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) by researchers at Rice University. This is the first time we've ever had clear evidence of what planet formation actually looks like.

There's a tremendous amount of detail being recorded right now by the ALMA array, and it shows dust and gases coming together to actually make a planet. In the photo above, the bright red is where there's the most dust and where carbon monoxide is appearing. That gas is freezing inside the dust, clumping together to form solid rock formations that seem to be sticking together, making an even larger object.

The threat of AI blowing up the world or keeping us in cages like animals might scare most people, but I think the prospects of AI could be truly transformative - and that we're bound by other things like society, religion, government and more - but according to one scientist, AI "could leave half the world unemployed".

According to Moshe Vardi, who told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): "We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?".

Vardi is a professor at Rice University Guggenheim fellow, adding that technology is a bigger threat than UAVs that some fear, adding that AI could see unemployment numbers hitting 50%, taking away middle-class jobs, and making the wealth gap even bigger.

It might seem like fantasy, but scientists have found a way to delete bad memories from your head - forever. The news is coming from a new documentary being shown in the US this week called "Memory Hackers".

Memory Hackers is a NOVA documentary from PBS, which looks into the cutting edge research being done on the nature of memory, and how it might be used for the benefit of mankind. The filmmakers said: "For much of human history, memory has been seen as a tape recorder that faithfully registers information and replays it intact".

They continue: "But now, researchers are discovering that memory is far more malleable, always being written and rewritten, not just by us but by others. We are discovering the precise mechanisms that can explain and even control our memories".

North Korea set a major record over the weekend following the launch of their first satellite -carrying rocket. The problem, however, is that the Kwangmyŏngsŏng-4 satellite doesn't even work at all. And it's tumbling about in orbit, on a trajectory to burn-up in orbit. And smash into the Earth.

The US Department of Defense and other agencies around the world have analyzed the orbital object and have determined that it's in an unstable orbit, and absolutely incapable of functioning in any useful way. Other than as a proof of concept.

Of course officials from various countries and the U.N. Security Council are worried that this test is a display of their technological prowess and a secretive way to test technologies that could evolve into better intercontinental ballistic missiles, or even spy satellites.

NASA has announced that it will be providing MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) with one of its huge 6-foot, 290-pound humanoid robots. MIT will use it to test and develop for future space missions to Mars, and beyond.

CSAIL Principal Investigator Russ Tedrake will work on algorithms for the robot, which is known as "Valkyrie" or "R5". Tedrake's work will be part of NASA's upcoming Space Robotics Challenge, with its missions to create more dexterous autonomous robots that will help, or one day replace humans on "extreme space" missions.

NASA says that it's interested in humanoid robots because they can assist, or replace humans working in extreme space environments. For future missions, humanoid robots can do tasks that humans simply can't do - like out in space itself, where humans die with a lack of oxygen - and that little thing called gravity.

Last week, Google's DeepMind AI beat the European champion of the board game Go. Following that, it promptly set its sights on world champion Lee Sedol. Happily, you'll be able to watch the upcoming match on YouTube, where it will be broadcast live.

A date has been set, too: March 9 through March 15 is when the $1 million match will go down.

Of the match, Sedol says, "I have heard that Google DeepMind's AI is surprisingly strong and getting stronger, but I am confident that I can win, at least this time," indicating he's taken note of the rapid progress Google has made and expects it will continue to make.