Lifeboat Foundation

By pieter spronck and jaap van den herik

While the audiovisual qualities of games have improved significantly over the last twenty years, game artificial intelligence (AI) has been largely neglected. Since the turn of the century game development companies have discovered that nowadays it is the quality of the game AI that sets apart good games from mediocre ones. The Institute of Knowledge and Agent Technology (IKAT) of the Universiteit Maastricht examines methods to enhance game AI with machine learning techniques. Several typical characteristics of games, such as their inherent randomness, require novel machine learning approaches to allow them to deal with game AI.

Most commercial computer games contain computer-controlled agents that oppose the human player. ‘Game AI’ encompasses the decision-making capabilities of these agents. For implementing game AI, especially for complex games, developers usually resort to rule-based techniques in the form of scripts. Scripts have the advantage that they are easy to understand and can be used to implement fairly complex behaviour.

Continue reading “Game Artificial Intelligence that Adapts to the Human Player” »

Recent attempts to move beyond narrow AI applications in industry have struggled to gain traction. ReThink Robotics, a leading startup founded by AI founding MIT researcher Dr. Rodney Brooks to create adaptive collaborative robots for industrial robotics, closed its doors in October 2018 and has since had its IP acquired by HAHN Group. In a retrospective published by The Robot Report, several contributing factors led to the shutdown. ReThink’s reliance on series elastic actuators compromised the precision and repeatability found in typical actuators in favor of safety, which likely led to efforts to compensate on hardware through software.

While the company utilized innovative machine control and machine vision technologies in iterating on their robots, the combination of mechanical motion of firmware at the heart of their products led to a narrow range of issues at varying quality. This made Baxter and Sawyer, ReThink’s flagship industrial robots, ill-suited for adaptive industrial use.

Other companies attempting to build adaptive robots, including Jibo, have met similar troubles. Touted as an interactive social robot with a personality, Jibo launched their eponymous robot in November 2017 with an emphasis on naturalistic human-computer interaction, but entered the market with more limited functionality than cheaper smart assistant speakers. The company has since closed down and transferred ownership of their IP to SQN Venture Partners in November 2018.

Continue reading “The Expectations And Possibility Of Adaptive AI Hardware” »

Video games have increasingly demonstrated a great deal of audiovisual realism, in par with the massive performance improvement of computer systems. At the.

IBM’s biologically motivated machine learning accelerates brain research.

The AI taught itself the skill through a technique called reinforcement learning — essentially, it picked up the rules of the game over thousands of matches in randomly generated environments.

A paper on their research was published today in Science.

“How you define teamwork is not something I want to tackle,” Max Jaderberg, a DeepMind researcher who worked on the project told The New York Times. “But one agent will sit in the opponent’s base camp, waiting for the flag to appear, and that is only possible if it is relying on its teammates.”

Continue reading “DeepMind’s Gamer AI is Better At Co-op Mode Than Human Players” »

Practical quantum computers may be another step closer to reality – and like so many technologies, we have graphene to thank for it. The bits of information in quantum computers (qubits) can famously exist in two states at once, and now researchers from MIT and other institutions have managed to record just how long that superposition state can last in a qubit made of graphene.

The Squair portable air cleaner promises to use cold plasma to fill your space with pollution-gobbling, bacteria-zapping oxygen atoms.

Researchers at Technische Universität Darmstadt have recently demonstrated the defect-free assembly of versatile target patterns of up to 111 single-atom quantum systems. Their findings, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, could drive assembled-atom architectures beyond the threshold of quantum advantage, paving the way for new breakthroughs in quantum science and technology.

“Our research is driven by the observation that physical sciences are right in the middle of a paradigm shift in which the application of quantum physics, i.e. quantum technologies, are becoming the leading technologies in the near future,” Gerhard Birkl, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “A vast list of applications are already foreseeable but I am convinced that of most applications we are not even aware of.”

The next step for the field of quantum science and technology is the development of experimental platforms that offer extensive scalability, multisite quantum correlations and efficient quantum error correction. Over the past century or so, researchers have carried out a substantial amount of work on single quantum systems, laying the foundations for current developments. Atomic quantum systems have played a key role in these studies, particularly neutral atoms trapped by light, as they provide well-isolated quantum systems with favorable scaling.

Continue reading “The defect-free assembly of 2-D clusters with over 100 single-atom quantum systems” »

A new study shows that quantum technology will catch up with today’s encryption standards much sooner than expected. That should worry anybody who needs to store data securely for 25 years or so.