Lifeboat Foundation

Ars talks to robotics rockstar Hiroshi Ishiguro, on crafting convincing human-android interactions.

A master player of the game Go has won his first match against a Google computer program, after losing three in a row in a best-of-five competition.

Lee Se-dol, one of the world’s top players, said his win against AlphaGo was “invaluable”.

The Chinese board game is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess, and AlphaGo’s wins were seen as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence expert Jerry Kaplan says those whose jobs involve ‘a narrow set of duties’ are most likely to see their work replaced by automation.

“Deep learning enables the robot to perceive its immediate environment, including the location and movement of its limbs. Reinforcement learning means improving at a task by trial and error. A robot with these two skills could refine its performance based on real-time feedback.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Google and Facebook Team Up to Open Source the Gear Behind Their Empires.

Go-ing for the sweep.

This is the first time an artificially intelligent system has topped one of the best at Go. Its victory shows how quickly AI will progress in years to come.

This is all the best games from every year 1952–2015.
Here is the list:

1952: Nimrod Computer Game
1958: Tennis For Two
1971: Computer Space
1972: Pong
1973: Space Race
1974: Clean Sweep
1975: Anti-Ai
1976: Blockade
1977: Indy 500
1978: Sea Wolf 2
1979: Crash
1980: Pac-Man
1981: Ms. Pacman
1982: Paratrooper
1983: Super Gridder
1983: Hunchback
1984: Sokoban
1985: Super Mario Bros
1986: Outrun
1987: Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards.
1988: Super Mario Bros 3
1989: Xenon 2
1990: Prince Of Persia
1991: Prehistorik
1992: Wolfenstein 3D
1993: Day of the Tentacle
1994: The Lion King
1995: Command & Conquer
1996: Tomb Raider
1997: Gta
1998: Half Life
1999: Quake 3
2000: Max Payne
2001: Gta 3
2002: Serious Sam: The First Encounter
2003: Medal Of Honor Allied Assault
2004: Half Life 2
2005: World Of Warcraft
2006: Need For Speed Most Wanted
2007: Crysis
2008: Assassin’s Creed
2009: Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2
2010: Red Dead Redemption
2011: World Of Tanks
2012: Battlefield 3
2013: Gta 5
2014: Wolfenstein The New Order
2015: Tom Clancy’s The Division

Google has smartened up several of its products with a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning, which involves training neural networks on lots of data and then having them make predictions about new data. Google Maps, Google Photos, and Gmail, for example, have been enhanced with this type of technology. The next service that could see gains is Google Translate.

Well, let me back up. Part of Google Translate actually already uses deep learning. That would be the instant visual translations you can get on a mobile device when you hold up your smartphone camera to the words you want to translate. But if you use Google Translate to just translate text, you know that the service isn’t always 100 percent accurate.

In an interview at the Structure Data conference in San Francisco today, Jeff Dean, a Google senior fellow who worked on some of Google’s core search and advertising technology and is now the head of the Google Brain team that works on deep learning, said that his team has been working with Google’s translation team to scale out experiments with translation based on deep learning. Specifically, the work is based on the technology depicted in a 2014 paper entitled “Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks.”

Continue reading “Google Translate could become more accurate soon thanks to deep learning” »

At first, the Go champion thought the move was rather odd. Then he saw it was wonderful.