The Turing Test states that to be considered "sentient," an artificial intelligence must achieve a 30% success rate. That means Elbot's accomplishment, while noteworthy, does not an AI make.

Organizer Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading's School of Systems Engineering was excited anyway, and readily compared today's events to the time in the 1997 when IBM's Big Blue defeated chess master Gary Kasparov. "This has been a very exciting day with two of the machines getting very close to passing the Turing Test for the first time," he said.

Perhaps even more impressive was just how believable the computers were, even if the human speaking with them knew they were speaking with a machine.

"Today's results actually show a more complex story than a straight pass or fail by one machine. Where the machines were identified correctly by the human interrogators as machines, the conversational abilities of each machine was scored at 80 and 90%. This demonstrates how close machines are getting to reaching the milestone of communicating with us in a way in which we are comfortable. That eventual day will herald a new phase in our relationship with machines, bringing closer the time in which robots start to play an active role in our daily lives."

Note to Warnick: Read anything on robots written by Isaac Asimov, then get back to me. [Telegraph]

Each match consisted of 500 hands, with Polaris receiving the same cards in one room that the professionals received in another room. The duplicate system was used so that luck would be less of a factor and the game could be played as much on skill as possible.

Historically, computers have been better at playing games where all information is already on the board, such as chess. With poker, players have to make judgments based on incomplete information. Getting artificial intelligence to do that well is a big step, since real life problems are generally more like poker than like chess. [MSN Cosmic Log]

• While machines that could accurately reproduce the sound of human speech, such as Wolfgang von Kempelen's talking head, have been around since the late 1700s, no device has been able to learn the syntactical rules necessary for generating conversation.
• Secondly, the act of hearing and interpreting is more difficult to instill in a machine because of the on-the-fly signal processing that would be required. The complexity of the ear allows it to pick up on the most subtle nuances in sound (according to the article, people can distinguish between hot and cold coffee just by hearing it poured into a glass.
• Roger Schank is a philosopher-programmer who has spent his professional live trying to create a conscious computer that not only has a memory, but can also learn. After years in the field, Schank is skeptical it will ever happen. He says replicating idle chatter and the sheer complexity of speech in general is beyond the abilities of current scientists.
• Steven Pinkner, a Harvard cognitive scientist, says that natural speech could rely on the breadth of one's knowledge, which is "extraordinarily difficult" to endow to a computer.
• R&D efforts in speech recognition began in the 1950s and '60s, but researchers are still hung up on the number of ways to communicate the word yes. Speech engineers for Nuance found that Southerners in the U.S. tend to add "sir" or "ma'am" to responses where as Northerners do not. And "Valley Girl" speak tends to make computers interpret declarative statements as questions.
• Finding it difficult to make a computer able to "learn," scientists turned to brute-force computing and algorithms that relied upon mass amounts of data. But in 1969, high-ranking Bell Labs staffer John Pierce wrote that a speech machine that could recognize, but not understand, was utterly pointless.
• The big emphasis on speech recognition has now moved to emotional analysis, which still uses algorithms to estimate a caller's state of mind. Stanford researcher Elizabeth Shriberg says its impossible to compare emotions in acted speech to emotions in real speech. The escalation of anger, for example, happens in smaller, more subtle increments with authentic speech.
• The most promising breakthrough in emotional recognition is an agression detector that has been deployed through out parts of Europe. Sound Intelligence were able to recreate the processes of the inner ear on a computer, which spawned a device that could learn the sounds of different objects in action and identify them. The Dutch city of Groningen has placed this technology in its pubs, where if it detects excessively aggressive speech in the pub, it will alert the nearest police station. But as Seabrook comments, "This is no HAL."
• Other research labs, like the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, have turned to facial recognition to glean emotional insight, but have come up dry. "Emotions aren't discrete," lab chief Shrikanth Narayanan told the New Yorker. "They are a continuum, and it isnt clear to any one perceiver where one emotion ends and the other begins." To add insult to injury, there hasn't been any real demand for emotional recognition outside the call center arena.

So while we might not ever see a robot become a Nobel Laureate, there is one lession to be learned from this New Yorker piece — never talk freely while on hold with customer service. Seabrook learned while at B.B.N. Technologies that they still record the call while you're on hold to assess your emotional state. After a profanity-laced tirade, one annoyed caller took a couple of hits from his bong, waited a little longer, and hung up. [The New Yorker]

Well, we can't really say. The iCub will undergo pretty basic tests, such as shape analysis, nesting different sized cups and stacking wooden blocks, as well as speech development tasks, meaning iCub will be able to name actions it carries out, which will lead to a commentary of its routine. The overall goal was laid out by Angelo Cangelosi, Professor in Artificial Intelligence;

"The outcome of the research will define the scientific and technological requirements for the design of humanoid robots able to develop complex behavioral, thinking and communication skills through individual and social learning."

The team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Federal Institute of Technology created the little experimental learning devices to work in groups and hunt for "food" targets nearby while avoiding "poison." Imagine their surprise when one generation of robots learned to signal lies about the poison, sending opponents to their doom.

The little wheeled robots had neural circuitry with about 30 "genes" that determine their behavior, and how much they react to light in the environment. The food sources charged up the robots' batteries while the poison drained them, and by using the genes of the most successful feeders in 50 successive generations, the team was hoping to select the fittest.

Three colonies of bots in the 50th generation learned to signal to other robots in the group when then found food or poison. But the fourth colony included lying cheats that signaled food when they found poison and then calmly rolled over to the real food while other robots went to their battery-death. Eerily wicked, to say the least. Saving the robots' honor, luckily, there were also a few "hero robots" that signalled danger and then rolled to their death to save the others.

Will technology like this make its way into consumer robots sometime? We kind of hope not: not sure I'd like to argue with a Roomba about whether it had or hadn't swept up that mess behind the sofa.
[Discover Magazine]

The trick here is teaching computers to understand the geometric context of objects in a scene. And yes, we hear you. Consider the possibilities for porn. Indeed. – Charlie White

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Teach Computers To Perceive Three Dimensions in 2-D Images [Carnegie Mellon University] Thanks, Thomas!

The whole point of this tournament, where robots play against each other (and by the looks of the photo, torment small children in the penalty box) is to aide in the development of robot technology so that a team of robots will be able to beat the human world champions (c'mon, Andorra!) by 2050. Hopefully the Web will still be around by 2050 so we can report on the tournament's success. – Nicholas Deleon

RoboCup Official Site [RoboCup Federation via Who Ate All The Bratwurst]

"A three-dimensional avatar will lurk inside the cell phone and adjust itself to characteristics of the cell phone carriers. It's just like a sophisticated creature living inside a cell phone. An owner will be allowed to set its first personality by defining the underlying DNA."

The personality of the avatar depends on how you treat it. Something about that term "lurk" is a bit disconcerting. It sounds like this artificial personality can get to be quite a pain in the ass, expressing its loneliness and pleading with its owner to attend to it. Can't you hear it now, whining: We never go anywhere, or You don t bring me flowers any more, or We never talk ? Well, there's always the on-off switch, or as a last resort, uninstall.

Samsung software interacts with phone owner [Textually.org]