New AI Can Learn a Game By Watching You Play, Develop Its Own Strategies to Beat You.

As it watches, [the computer] uses standard image-processing tools to recognise changes in the separate board squares and pieces of a game, while ignoring extra details like human hands. The videos allow the system to learn the rules by logging what the board looks like when a game has been won, and what count as legal moves. Having mastered the rules, the software plays the game by examining all possible moves and choosing those it deems most likely to lead to a win.

As you would expect, its performance depends on the complexity of the game. Connect 4 has few possibilities, making it very hard to beat the trained computer.

(via Computer watches you play a game, then beats you at it - tech - 10 July 2012 - New Scientist)

(via joshbyard)

8bitfuture:

Japan planning ‘driverless driving’ for early 2020s.

Japan’s Transport Ministry is about to start a project to create an autopilot system which would take over for cars on expressways.

The ministry envisages an autonomous vehicle system in which, after leaving your home, you enter an interchange of a nearby expressway while manually operating your car.

When pulling into the expressway’s lane exclusively for the autopilot system, you change your driving mode to “automatic driving” and input your destination onto the system. You would take your hands and feet off the steering wheel, gas pedal and brake.

You would return to driving on your own only after reaching an intersection near your destination. Until then, you would leave all driving tasks to the self-steering system, comfortably enjoying whatever activity you like.

The system is hoped to alleviate congestion by keeping vehicles going at a constant speed, while eliminating accidents caused by vehicles veering out of lanes.

A study panel will being initial discussions about the project this month, with an aim to have the system operational in around 10 years.

(via 8bitfuture)

The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever | Wired Science | Wired.com

 I’m enrolled in CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, a graduate- level course taught by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

Last fall, the university in the heart of Silicon Valley did something it had never done before: It opened up three classes, including CS221, to anyone with a web connection. Lectures and assignments—the same ones administered in the regular on-campus class—would be posted and auto-graded online each week. Midterms and finals would have strict deadlines. Stanford wouldn’t issue course credit to the non-matriculated students. But at the end of the term, students who completed a course would be awarded an official Statement of Accomplishment.

People around the world have gone crazy for this opportunity. Fully two-thirds of my 160,000 classmates live outside the US. There are students in 190 countries—from India and South Korea to New Zealand and the Republic of Azerbaijan. More than 100 volunteers have signed up to translate the lectures into 44 languages, including Bengali. In Iran, where YouTube is blocked, one student cloned the CS221 class website and—with the professors’ permission—began reposting the video files for 1,000 students.

What is… Watson?

Just a year ago, a supercomputer called Watson changed forever how we imagine machine intelligence.

(via Sean Kelly Studio)

Watson’s New Job: IBM Salesman - Technology Review

IBM’s Watson supercomputer reached a milestone in artificial intelligence last February when it beat two Jeopardy! champions. Millions watched, and while some experts dismissed it as a publicity stunt, IBM said Watson would soon be helping doctors diagnose illness, and hinted at talks with gadget companies about Watson helping consumers with questions.

As IBM prepares to celebrate the first anniversary of the televised contest on February 16, though, it is not yet offering the question-answering system for sale. Although limited trials using Watson technology are underway in health and financial services businesses, the AI prodigy is having its biggest impact by pulling in new customers for existing business products—as IBM persuades them to organize their data into formats that an AI like Watson can better understand. IBM has created a slogan, “Ready for Watson,” to help sell its products that way.

IBM hasn’t disclosed how much it spent developing Watson, but the lengthy research and development process is believed to have cost in the tens of millions of dollars. To play Jeopardy, the system needed to understand the meaning of the answers posed as clues, and to rapidly apply general knowledge—distilled from the Internet and other sources—to identify possible answers. That required novel software and an expensive supercomputer.

“Customers are coming to us and saying ‘I’d like a Watson,’ ” says Stephen Gold, IBM’s director of worldwide marketing for Watson. Eventually, that might be possible, but first they need to have the right data sets for Watson to operate on.

Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here | Wired

…

Google isn’t the only company with driverless cars on the road. Indeed, just about every traditional automaker is developing its own self-driving model, peppering Silicon Valley with new R&D labs to work on the challenge. Last year, a BMW drove itself down the Autobahn, from Munich to Ingolstadt (“the home of Audi,” as BMW’s Dirk Rossberg told me at the company’s outpost in Mountain View, California). Audi sent an autonomous vehicle up Pikes Peak, while VW, in conjunction with Stanford, is building a successor to Junior. At the Tokyo Auto Show in November, Toyota unveiled its Prius AVOS (Automatic Vehicle Operation System), which can be summoned remotely. GM’s Alan Taub predicts that self-driving cars will be on the road by the decade’s end. Groups like the Society of Automotive Engineers have formed special committees to draft autonomous-vehicle standards.