Twilight Zone Robotics

taken from Wikipedia

Ah, I rediscovered the joy of watching The Twilight Zone, perfect to conclude a long evening shift at the hotel!

"Steel" is, in my humble opinion, not the best episode, but it is interesting: the story, written in 1963, is about "the future year of 1974" (*snigger*) and the interesting part is how they predict the evolution in robotics by that time.

Ayo Technology!

# Ja tvoi sluga, # ja tvoi Rabotnik # Ja tvoi sluga, # ja tvoi Rabotnik

We geeks (yes, geeks) already had a good month with IBM's Watson winning Jeopardy, beating the crap out of two human champions. Artificial inteligence is fascinating. But now I got news from a carnivorous robot and Thursday the first two-legged robot marathon kicked off in Osaka.

Deep Blue Jeopardy

Big Blue does it again: built a super computer and let's see if we can beat Jeopardy enthusiasts!

Ok, as an AI enthusiast, this is of course very impressive. To use a computer to search for interesting bits of knowledge, that is not that difficult, but creating an algorithm (or in this case: a stack of algorithms) that is able to play along a real Jeopardy episode (in Dutch, we call it Waagstuk), that is a big challenge.

Picture taken from Laboratoire d’Informatique des Systèmes Adaptatifs, Université de Montréal .