As you may have heard, IBM's computer "Watson" won handily over veteran "Jeopardy" champions. (Overview video) What does this mean?

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The other night, I toured a local company that uses robotics to build high-performance aluminum and iron parts. There are dozens of machines there to drill, shape, and assemble pieces, built into more complex robotic assembly lines than I'd seen before. And firsthand I've seen robots from precision circuit-builders to autonomous forklifts to a ( Read more... )

I just read about the results of the Loebner Prize Contest, the annual implementation of the Turing Test. One AI actually fooled a human judge! So is there progress being made toward real AI in this contest ( Read more... )

I spoke with one of the people who works on the Wolfram|Alpha AI, and he pointed out that the interview was fake. I'd asked him, "Could you please explain the part about how it handled the "white and grey matter" questions in the sample interview? It looks like the system was able to link the raw variable names of an equation to a set of English ( Read more... )

I was shown this interview with Wolfram Alpha, an AI developed by the mathematical experts at Wolfram. (I've been using their integral-finder site ( Read more... )

In between MATH and MATH and MATH and other problems, I've been messing around with a tiny simulated world for AI testing, called "Morningside". I wrote a series of challenges for myself and anyone else who cares. The final exam involves surviving for 1000 turns in that little board-game world, by gathering food, and answering a set of questions ( Read more... )

I pointed out my little AI world-sim to the Singularity Institute as a possible tool for their use. Interesting replies so far ( Read more... )

http://kschnee.xepher.net/code/morningsideRead more... )

http://kschnee.xepher.net/loebner/lpc2009/

Here are the first human-readable transcripts from the 2009 Loebner Prize Contest, for AI. They were produced by the little Python program I wrote to ungarble them from the official format.

Sample:
Local: ello ( Read more... )

Ah, here's a brief explanation of an AI story that was told to me in Indiana. This is about why gravity drowned.

An AI program, TaleSpin, was assigned to write little stories. It produced the following:

Henry Squirrel was thirsty. He walked over to the river bank where his good friend Bill Bird was sitting. Henry slipped and fell in the river. ( Read more... )