Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 11317

A competition pitting artificial intelligence (AI) against human players in the classic video game Doom has demonstrated just how advanced AI learning techniques have become – but it’s also caused considerable controversy.

While several teams submitted AI agents for the deathmatch, two students in the US have caught most of the flak, after they published a paper online detailing how their AI bot learned to kill human players in deathmatch scenarios.

The computer science students, Devendra Chaplot and Guillaume Lample, from Carnegie Mellon University, used deep learning techniques to train their AI bot – nicknamed Arnold – to navigate the 3D environment of the first-person shooter Doom.

Read more

When kids learn about the planet’s water cycle, they’re taught a simple concept: our atmosphere is filled with water vapour that has evaporated from the bodies of liquid water we see around us. When the vapour’s temperature gets low enough, it gets turned back into water.

The presence of that vapour becomes especially apparent in the summer when droplets collect on glasses of ice water and air conditioning units drip onto unsuspecting passersby.

An Israeli company called Water-Gen does not think of that condensation as a byproduct; instead, it has built machines specifically designed to create and harvest as much condensation as possible.

Read more

Project DataWorks predictive model (credit: IBM)

IBM today announced today Watson -based “Project DataWorks,” the first cloud-based data and analytics platform to integrate all types of data and enable AI-powered decision-making.

Project DataWorks is designed to make it simple for business leaders and data professionals to collect, organize, govern, and secure data, and become a “cognitive business.”

Read more

As the saying goes, “If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself,” and it seems that you’ll soon be able to get a lot more done using artificially intelligent, high-tech exoskeleton Kindred. It’s the product of a startup created by quantum computing company D-Wave’s founder Geordie Rose, and according to the venture capital firm funding Kindred, the device “uses AI-driven robotics so that one human worker can do the work of four.”

Based on a patent application, the wearable system is envisioned as a 1.2-meter tall humanoid that may be covered with synthetic skin. It will include a head-mounted display and an exo-suit of sensors and actuators that carries out everyday tasks.

Essentially, it looks something like Spider-Man’s Doctor Octopus on the outside, but on the inside, Kindred utilizes quantum computation, a way of information processing and storage that is much faster and more powerful than that used by conventional computers. Data “learned” by the suit can be taught to other robots, allowing those robots to then perform the tasks autonomously.

Read more

Phototactic behaviour directs some bacteria towards light and others into darkness: This enables them to utilize solar energy as efficiently as possible for their metabolism, or, otherwise, protects them from excessive light intensity. A team of researchers headed by Clemens Bechinger from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of Stuttgart, as well as colleagues from the University of Düsseldorf have now found a surprisingly simple way to direct synthetic microswimmers towards light or darkness. Their findings could eventually lead to minuscule robots that seek out and treat lesions in the human body.

Read more