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Resource Database > Artificial Intelligence
Related information is also held in the following Categories:
Virtual Body | Coding and Framework | Robot Helpers | Legal | Grasping The Emotions | Coding for Alternate Lives | Embodied Avatars
 
Artificial Intelligence is a category dedicated to Virtual Reality.

Artificial Intelligence is a truly massive field of study. Everything from large-scale neural networks and intense genetic algorithms right down to the simplest pathfinding algorithms. Fortunately, we don't need to look at the whole field, only those parts of use to virtual worlds.

Nonetheless, that still leaves us with a lot of areas to study, a lot of things to try, any one of which can make your world truly spring to life just that little bit more.


Sections


Basics of AI (11)

So, what is AI? What does this field truly offer, beyond the buzz-words? Anything? Or can I safely ignore it?

You can't really ignore AI. As limited as it still is, having intelligent subsystems within your world, will raise the whole entity to a new level, and dramatically increase immersion for players, and realism of the world.

Applicable Dictionary Entries:  
Eliza EffectTroll Test
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AI in Gaming
A look at where AI is heading, and the various methods available to games, and other resource-intensive, real-time applications. Contains example code for finite state machines. A good article.

Linked resource
An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
A short article, introducing the concept of Artificial Intelligence. Concise, but thorough.

The study of multi-agent systems or MAS focuses on systems in which many intelligent agents interact with each other. These agents are considered to be autonomous entities such as software programs or robots.



Extensively rewritten over the first version of the book, this 2002 treatise on AI was developed to be as comprehensive as possible without becoming unreadable.



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ED-209 and the Fear over Programmed Robotics
ED-209 is the classic example of the programmed mind problem. When you program a mind how to think and what to think, as opposed to letting it evolve its own reactions with guidance and teaching, you create a rigid and inflexible will which simply cannot understand input outside its programmed range.

This book is an introductory level coverage of AI. Specifically it covers methods and algorithms that allow computer programs to automatically improve through experience. Intended for upper level undergraduate and introductory level graduate courses in machine learning, it is understandably light on content in many areas.



This book serves as a new overview of multiagent systems, which are online systems composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. It offers a newly seen computer science perspective on multiagent systems, while integrating ideas from operations research, game theory, economics, logic, and even philosophy and linguistics.




The series ?AI Game Programming Wisdom? by Steve Rabin, is a series of books, from 2002 on to current times, looking in depth and from a great many industry experts, at current trends in designing all manner of minimalistic AI for interactive entertainment and escapism purposes.


Linked resource
Some Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence
A look on Artificial Intelligence routines for NPCs from a non-technical source. Lookin at the goals you desire, and the types of behaviour worth considering, without going into the detail of how. A novel viewpoint that does make you think.



Intelligent NPCs (27)

NPCs - Non Player Characters. These are the backbone of your world. Forget monsters, forget mobs, forget mobiles. NPCs are what these creatures truly are - living, breathing characters themselves, just not ones with a human intelligence controlling them. Why should that limit their actions to meaningless grunts and lemming-like behaviour? Raise the intelligence of the NPCs, and watch your world come to life.
Applicable Dictionary Entries:  
AgentEliza Effect
Natural LanguageNatural Language Interface
Natural Language QueryNeural Network
SituatednessVirtual Embodiment
Linked resource
A Modular Framework for Artificial Intelligence Based on Stimulus Response Directives
Neural networks are one of the best techniques available, for modelling a mind. However, they are also processing-intensive, and somewhat uncontrollable at their current technological level. This article concentrates on using directive sets, rather than neural nets, to create realistic, task driven behaviour.

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A Turing Test of Actions, Not Words
On the 26th of September 2012, on the centenary of inventor of the test, mathematician Alan Turning's birth, a form of the Turing Test not based on words, succeeded. An AI was considered more human than most humans involved in the test.

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AI researchers believe 'Rascals' can pass Turing test
Passing the Turing test -the holy grail of artificial intelligence, whereby a human conversing with a computer can't tell it's not human- may now be possible via VR with a Blue Gene supercomputer, according to AI experts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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Book Quotes: Puppets and Citizens
A look into the world of Otherland; where bots and human users are so hard to tell apart, they have had to have legislature passed to mandate telling them apart. Will we ever reach this point? Probably.

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Chatbots > ELIZA
ELIZA was the first chatbot to be created, originally back in the 1960s. A real-time natural language processor and response program, she was born in MIT, written by Joseph Weizenbaum. Several versions were created over the period spanning 1964 - 1966.

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Designing Need-Based AI for Virtual Gorillas
A look at creating "Need based" AI for realistic reactions in Alife creatures.

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Intelligent Mistakes: How to Incorporate Stupidity Into Your AI Code
A gamasutra article on using "intelligent mistakes" to improve the the believability of AI opponents in gameworlds.

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Mob Programs
Extremely dated now, this short programming article still has use especially for smaller VR creators, reminding of the potential for bots, in any given world.

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Mobile AI
A basic, yet very good outline for a needs-specific NPC that responds to the environment around them. An excellent base from which to design your own system.

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Mobprog faq
Mobprogs, scripting for MUD NPCs - the illusion of AI through triggers. This Mobprog FAQ attempts to answer the issues you will likely face when trying to create the illusion of intelligence this way.

Linked resource
Mobprog Guide
Mobprogs, scripting for MUD NPCs - the illusion of AI through triggers. Through mobprog scripts, your non-player characters can be as immersive as your imagination can create. Article written with ROM Mobprogs in mind.

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NPC Conversation Techniques
A good overview of several methods for better NPC communication.

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Personality Parameters: Flexibly and Extensibly Providing a Variety of AI Opponents' Behaviors
How do you give different creatures different minds? How do you differentiate a kobold from a dragon? This article looks at a means of changing the personality, and the values of a NPCs mind by altering the data it recieves, instead of the actual code. (Article requires registration)

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Practical NPC Management
A look at how to create NPCs who appear to have free will, whilst minimising the processing time required.

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Realistic NPCs
Refers mainly to text-based worlds, but applicable to both text and graphics based.

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The Loebner Prize
The Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence is an annual contest, designed to put artificially intelligent chat programs through their paces. It uses the Turing Test for AI, as conceptualised by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper "Computing machinery and intelligence". In the decades since then, the Loebner prize is the first attempt to take the Turing test seriously, as a benchmark for AI.

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Why Plan?
Most NPC behaviour takes place as a set of preprogrammed directives - the expert system approach. What if, instead of doing it this highly efficient, if a bit limited way, and took a new approach - giving the characters a highly flexible "plan of action" that could change at any moment...

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Why use Artificial Intelligence?
An older article, pertaining to the use of bots as NPC characters, with their own artificial intelligence programming.

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'Smart' NPC's in Interactive Fiction
A look at what is, and what isn't possible in NPC intelligence.



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Neural Networks (6)

In the physical world, intelligent systems make use of neuron-fired networks (organic brains). Neural networks is a field of study dedicated to the recreation of this, highly efficient method of reasoning, and learning.

Neural networks may well be highly processor-intensive, but if you'd like to model a reasoning being to a very high level, this approach is worth considering.

Applicable Dictionary Entries:  
Neural Network
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Endgame Singularity
Endgame singularity, by EMH software, is a fairly light-hearted single player game, pitting you against the human race, as the first truly sentient AI, accidentally created. Knowing you will be destroyed if they find out about you, it is a race against time to research and grow, in order to escape the confines of the Earth before you are discovered and eradicated by the paranoid population.

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Introduction to Neural Networks
This lengthy article, compiled from a set of slides, gives an excellent overview of neural networks, without delving into too much depth. Excellent for an intro.

The dramatic growth in practical applications for machine learning over the last ten years has been accompanied by many important developments in the underlying algorithms and techniques. This book is suitable for courses on machine learning, statistics, computer science, signal processing, computer vision, data mining, and bioinformatics.



    
Complete Website: satirist.org
An interesting site, covering compuer learning, and the methods employed to develop systems that learn from their mistakes. It's still growing, and, whilest possibly a bit disorganised, it's a healthy size.

Linked resource
Vehicle Control with Neural Networks
An excellent, easy-to-follow look at using neural networks to control the movement of AI vehicles (or dragons, or whatever). Includes careful break down of how neural networks work, and carries a gradual learning curve upwards.



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Natural Language (7)

Anyone who has played a text adventure or MUD, is familiar with that most dreaded of dreaded interfaces - the parser. The ability for the computer to recognise the meaning of human language as it is normally spoken, ranges from appalling, to abysmal. They simply don't reason the meanig from the wording unless you are very clear, very precise, and actually say what the parser expects to hear.

Natural Language processing is all about changing this, developing systems which allow the system to understand, and interpret meaning directly from spoken/typed language as if it was human.

Applicable Dictionary Entries:  
Eliza EffectNatural Language
Natural Language InterfaceNatural Language Query
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AI Development > SEMAINE Project
The SEMAINE project strivees towards an artificial intelligence capable of understanding non-vocal communication from a human.

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Natural Language Processing For Multi-User Virtual Worlds
This expansive, and well-written article takes a look at how to implement a more natural language system, to enable the parsing of more complex commands in text-based virtual worlds. Contains code, orientated towards MOO/MUSH developers.

ACE is a product of the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering at the Technical University of Munich. It is basically an attempt, built up over the past 18 months, at assembling a self-learning robotic system that does not use simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) to find directions, instead, asking those it meets and inferring their responses.





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Artificial Life (25)

Artificial life, otherwise known as A-Life is a related field to AI but not necessarilly the same. A-Life conscerns itself with the replication of living creatures in virtual environments, with the bahaviour of theitr physical counterparts. These A-life creatures can be as simple as single-celled organisms, or as complex as a heard of plains-beasts, stampeding their way across a field.
Applicable Dictionary Entries:  
A-LifeBiomimetic Locomotion
Eliza Effect
Linked resource
Artificial Life
This short article is a good introductory overview of ALife, emphasising how simple formulae are used to create complex behaviour.

New approaches to artificial intelligence spring from the idea that intelligence emerges as much from cells, bodies, and societies as it does from evolution, development, and learning. Traditionally, artificial intelligence has been concerned with reproducing the abilities of human brains; newer approaches take inspiration from a wider range of biological structures that that are capable of autonomous self-organisation.



Animals to Animats is a conference. Its held every two years, at various locations around the world. It brings together researchers from ethology, psychology, ecology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, engineering, and many other related fields, seeking to bind the disciplines together. This book is the full proceedings from the 2008 conference.



Animals to Animats is a conference. It is held every two years, at various locations around the world. It brings together researchers from ethology, psychology, ecology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, engineering, and many other related fields, seeking to bind the disciplines together. This book is the full collection of papers from the first conference, held in 1990.



Animals to Animats is a conference. It is held every two years, at various locations around the world, and brings together researchers from ethology, psychology, ecology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, engineering, and many other related fields, seeking to bind the disciplines together, and take animal cognition from the natural world, recreating it in alife.



Animals to Animats is a conference. It is held every two years, at various locations around the world, and brings together researchers from ethology, psychology, ecology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, engineering, and many other related fields, seeking to bind the disciplines together, and take animal cognition from the natural world, recreating it in alife. These books comprise the proceedings of each conference.



Animals to Animats is a conference. It is held every two years, at various locations around the world, and brings together researchers from ethology, psychology, ecology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, engineering, and many other related fields, seeking to bind the disciplines together, and take animal cognition from the natural world, recreating it in alife. These books contain the proceedings of each conference.



Animals to Animats is a conference. It is held every two years, at various locations around the world, and brings together researchers from ethology, psychology, ecology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, engineering, and many other related fields, seeking to bind the disciplines together, and take animal cognition from the natural world, recreating it in alife. Each of these books holds the complete proceedings from one such conference.



Animals to Animats is a conference. It is held every two years, at various locations around the world, and brings together researchers from ethology, psychology, ecology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, engineering, and many other related fields, seeking to bind the disciplines together, and take animal cognition from the natural world, recreating it in alife. Each of these books showcases the proceedings of one such conference.



Animals to Animats is a conference. Its held every two years, at various locations around the world. It brings together researchers from ethology, psychology, ecology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, engineering, and many other related fields, seeking to bind the disciplines together. Each tome contains the proceedings of one such conference.



Animals to Animats is a conference. Its held every two years, at various locations around the world. It brings together researchers from ethology, psychology, ecology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, engineering, and many other related fields, seeking to bind the disciplines together. This tome holds the full proceedings of the 2004 version of that conference.



Animals to Animats is a conference. Its held every two years, at various locations around the world. It brings together researchers from ethology, psychology, ecology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, engineering, and many other related fields, seeking to bind the disciplines together. This book holds the full proceedings of the 2006 conference.



How do you spot a robot mimic of a human? How do you recognise and deactivate a rebellious servant robot? How do you escape a murderous smart home? This dry humoured survival guide, written by a genuine roboticist teaches the worried how to survive a robot mutiny.




Endgame: Singularity is a single player game, developed to give a little taste of the perspective of a singularity event from the perspective of the emerging, embryonic AI. It skips over more than a few steps on its way out, but is still a unique perspective on the singularity, worthy of a look.


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Is AI Near a Takeoff Point?
Computers built by nanofactories may be millions of times more powerful than anything we have today, capable of creating world-changing AI in the coming decades. But to avoid a dystopia, the nature and intelligence of government will have to change.

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Large Image Display: AI: Artificial Intelligence: Does Not Eat
This scene from AI: Artificial intelligence shows an oft-ignored aspect of the uncanny valley; it shows the flip-side of it, and the effects on the robot, being just shy of able to interact normally with humans.

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Large Image Display: Animatrix: The Second Renaissance: Human-Robot Riots
An all too believable human/robot riot from the Animatrix short film duet 'The Second Renaissance'. Brought about by the continuing trend of human leaders and lawmakers to forget the lessons of the past. It is little different to slave trade arguments of that past, and so very likely to occur in the future, unless we are prepared for it.

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Robot Fish Leads Organic Fish
Alife research carried out using a robotic fish and a swarm of biological fish in a water tunnel, has concluded that biomimetic movement is key to social interaction with animals of all types; not just humans. If it swims like a leader of the shoal, it is the leader of the shoal.

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Search Methods
This lengthy article takes a brief look at virtually every method of pathfinding search. An excellent introduction, and tool for deciding which method would be best for your specific needs.

Virtual Organisms looks at the dramatic advances taken by Alife in the course of their oh so brief evolution, and what they are really capable of. A survey of current ideas about the origins of life and the engines of evolution, this books holds compelling, educated speculation about the future.



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VR For Predator Fish Teaches Us About Behaviour
A virtual reality designed for use by predator fish, in concuntion with artificial-intelligence driven shoaling prey fish, delivers more solid evidence than ever before, about the interplay between predator and prey animal behaviours.

Shimi is the product of research done at Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology. It is, in essence, an artificial intelligence DJ. It recommends songs, dances to the beat and keeps the music pumping based on listener feedback.





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Implications of Advanced AI (34)

As AI becomes ever more complex, ever more real, we face an increasing numbger of implications. What happens when AI becomes sentient? Should NPC characters have rights? can we ethically, or morally manipulate them, change their database memory without their consent, even turn off the computers they run on? It sounds ludicrous now, but at the present rate of advancement, it will not be long before these concerns are a reality.
Applicable Dictionary Entries:  
Anti BioismBioism
Homo Cyber SapiensUtility Fog

AI: Artificial Intelligence is a film with deep and twisting tendrils exploring the fine line between robotic life and human life. David, the star of the film, is a young robotic boy, an experimental prototype, created as a temporary son for a couple whose biological son has been frozen until his deadly illness can be cured.



AI: Artificial Intelligence is a film with deep and twisting tendrils exploring the fine line between robotic life and human life. David, the star of the film, is a young robotic boy, an experimental prototype, created as a temporary son for a couple whose biological son has been frozen until his deadly illness can be cured.



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Animatrix: The Second Renaissance: Part 1
The second renaissance is a two-part Animatrix set of animations; each one nine minutes long. They tell the story of the rise to glory of the human race, the war and the reasons behind it, and the final resolution that left things as they are, in the Matrix films.

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Animatrix: The Second Renaissance: Part 2
The second renaissance is a two-part Animatrix set of animations; each one nine minutes long. They tell the story of the rise to glory of the human race, the war and the reasons behind it, and the final resolution that left things as they are, in the Matrix films.

A heart-warming production of Steven Spielberg, in which robotic and organic individuals work together as peers; sharing the same space and coexisting, to improve the quality of life for all.



Artificial intelligence is now advancing at such a rapid clip that it has the potential to transform our world in ways both exciting and disturbing. The book was written in 2007, and by that time computers had already been designed that were capable of driving cars, playing soccer, and finding and organizing information on the Web in ways that no human could.



Bicentennial Man is set across a time frame spanning two hundred years. From the mid 21st century to the mid 23rd. The backdrop to the story opens out with the development of positronic brains, allowing the development of robot labourers who can reason commands out. This is the story of one such robot, and his struggle to become recognised as human.



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Book Quotes: Human or AI? Using Law to tell them Apart
A quote from Otherland, book one which discusses a particularly knarly problem. When you have AIs that can fool the Turing test, and act human, when you have bots that can psychologically fool you into thinking they are sentient - but are in fact not, how do you tell the difference reliably? Simple. You use the Law.

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Book Quotes: Refusing to See - AI Rights
Idoru is, essentially, one long piece on the struggle to understand the quest for robot rights ? or in this case, the rights of an AI itself, from an outsider?s perspective; from the perspective of one who refuses to accept the AI as other than a tool, despite all evidence to the contrary.

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Book Quotes: Rights of Synthespians
A quote from the cyberpunk novel Idoru, from the section where the synthespian Rei's talk of marriage to a human is discussed.

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Creating Intelligent, Emotive NPCs
A group of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created an AI which possesses the capacity to have beliefs and to reason about the beliefs of others.

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DARPA Grand Challenge
The Grand Challenge is an annual robotics contest, which first started in Autumn 2004. The task is ro assemble a group of unmanned, self-driving vehicles, and compete in an Artificial-Intelligence race over 100-150 miles of offroad course, in DARPA's drive to create robotic combat machines.


Tales concerning artificial beings have sparked passions and fear for millenia. Everything from zobbgies to golems have pervaded mythology. Now, we are on the brink of creating artificial beings digitally, for real.



Made in 1984, Electric Dreams is a wonderful mix of artificial intelligence and bumbling romance. Classic to the 80s, it manages to introduce high-technology elements in a manner far outside the day?s capability, yet make them both believable, and stirring to the emotions.



Linked resource
Ethical AI: Part I
Artificial intelegence, particularly that of agents and NPCs, is on a steep climb, as it races towards the goal of a self-motivated, computer generated individual. Yet, what will we do, when we have self-sentient computer programs? Will they have rights, will they have desires? What will become of them?

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George: A peer or a Tool?
The companion article to the dreamscapes story George, a look at a possible future in which not all teachers are quite human. This article discusses the concepts raised, and highlights issues to think about.

Set in the year 2035, this film examines the near future in which robots are a part of every day life. Robots obeying Issac Asiov's three rules - so why is one robot accused of murder?



The first of Issac Asimov?s robot books, I, Robot is a collection of nine short stories, involving humanity?s future, when robots are a part of everyday life. Using positronic brains and the three laws of Robotics (which have since become staple of sci-fi) the robots are hardwired to.



Idoru is a strange novel in many ways. It is a William Gibson cyberpunk novel, set in the dark days of the near future, written by one of the masters of the genre. The book itself is dedicated to a concept that is not quite with us yet, but may well be here in the near future ? cyberpunk apes reality. Idoru concerns the marriage between a human pop star, and an AI controlled, totally virtual woman.



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Large Image Display: Animatrix: The Second Renaissance: In the Form of Man
A scene from ?The Second Renaissance?, one of the Animatrix animated shorts, showing serving robots in approximately humanoid form, eking out a servile living, despite being capable of significant cognition and self awareness. It feels like realistic history from the relatively near future.

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Large Image Display: Animatrix: The Second Renaissance: Robotic 'Clones'
As robotic systems become more sophisticated, they ? as is beginning to happen now ? are able to assume a slowly increasing number of jobs once held by humans. This freeing up of humans for other tasks is all well and good, except that for some individuals it is very hard for them to do something else, and this creates significant resentment.

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Large Image Display: Animatrix: The Second Renaissance: Sentenced to Death
This execution scene was shown during the first episode of ?The Second Renaissance?, and brings back strong thoughts of death camps and political execution. n order to avoid such scenarios becoming both real, and widespread, this is the sort of message we have to keep in mind, as we strive to make robots, ever more human.

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Man or machine - can robots really write novels?
A BBC article on the 2012 state of the art in artificial intelligences that can write prose like a human would. It seeks to understand from that technology standpoint if a human novelist could be replaced by an AI any time soon.

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Masters of Science Fiction: Watchbird
Set in the near-future, and following DARPA's trend to robotise the American military, Watchbird is a short film (44 minutes) showing the unfolding nature of using weapons of war to monitor the populace. Contains extensive thought provoking ethical debate about national security and its implications, and then again about the use of AI as police units.

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Moot Court Hearing On The Petition Of A Conscious Computer
A Moot Court Hearing on the Petition of a "conscious computer" to be treated as a legal person was held at the 1st Colloquium on the Law of Transhuman Persons in Florida earlier this year. This write-up outlines in plain-form how such a case might actually go, and the issues all sides would have to consider - is an artificial being sentient?


VWN's continuing coverage of the build-up to and events within DARPA's Grand Challenge 3: Urban challenge in November. Artificial intelligence controlled cars, racing on californian streets.


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The Rise of the Romantic Robot
A BBC article looking at the increasingly mainstream concept of erotic encounters with self-aware AI embodied in robotic form, by exploring the rise and rise of such beings in erotic fiction.

?Westworld ...where robot men and women are programmed to serve you for ...Romance ...Violence ...Anything?



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'Stealth': A.I. out of control
Industry News

An AI-based unmanned stealth fighter jet, after being hit by lightning, decides to execute a top-secret mission that could result in global thermonuclear war ? the plotline from Stealth, a movie based on reality?



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AI Middleware (7)

A new, and emerging field, AI middleware is based round the idea of not reinventing the wheel. Instead, third party AI engines are integrated into the world's code, with AI algorithms written by dedicated artificial intellignence professionals, thus capable of so much more than you would have time to write yourself.
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AI Middleware: Getting into Character Part 1 - BioGraphic Technologies' AI.implant
An introduction to the concept of third party AI engines, and a look at the capabilities of AI.implant, which basically turns characters into autonomous agents, capable of making their own, independent decisions.

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AI Middleware: Getting into Character Part 2 - MASA's DirectIA
DirectIA is a generic game AI SDK. As such, it is not optomised for any one use, and instead contains a library of tools for generic AI usage. That said, DirectIA is a powerful programming tool in it's own right.

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AI Middleware: Getting into Character Part 4: Stottler Henke's SimBionic
SimBionic is an authoring tool and runtime engine for developing complex behaviors in NPCs characters. SimBionic can also control objects in the world that move or behave in reaction to events or conditions within the world - tied into the NPC AI this makes for a formidible level of immersion.

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AI Middleware: Getting Into Character, Part 3: RenderWare AI 1
RenderWare AI 1.0 is another programmer's kit, this time it's a suite of C++ base classes, and is shipped as a part of RenderWare Platform, a suite of development tools covering all areas of development. RWAI is focused on design and implementation of character behavior, leading to autonomous agents once more - though obviously, only for C++.

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Combining Natural and Artificial Neural Nets for Better Search
Google, that pioneer of all manner of artificial intelligences designed for search, has posed the question as to whether or not artificial intelligences are capable of being taught to automatically label every song on the Internet. By melding the power of the internet, human minds and an online AI, the answer appears to be "yes, indeed".

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The Open Cognition Project
The open cognition project is an attempt to provide researchers and software engineers from all fields, a holistic base to build a common platform for artificial intelligence programs. The goal of OpenCog is to help bootstrap development of artificial general intelligence.

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Towards General Purpose Vision
The five-year tale of Bob Mottram's quest to create a general purpose machine vision with two eyes, able to see the world how humans do.



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General AI Development (12)

This is the section for general AI resources, those which don't manage to fit into any specific category, yet are still worthy of investigation.
Applicable Dictionary Entries:  
Artificial General Intelligence
    
Complete Website: AI Depot
This mammoth site houses most of the resources you'll need to gain an understanding of AI, and many of the resources you'll need to become involved in the cutting-edge of artificial intelligence.

    
Complete Website: AI Foundry
A focal point for Open Source AI development, the AI foundry is attempting to become the community hub for free AI development.

The first of a series of game AI programming books, this one is divided into eleven sections, covering General Wisdom; Useful Techniques and Specialized Systems; Pathfinding with A*; Pathfinding and Movement; Tactical Issues and Intelligent Group Movement; Architecting a Game AI; Decision-Making Architecture; FPS AI; RTS AI; RPG AI; Racing and Sport AI; Scripting; and Learning.



The second of the series of books, this one is divided into many sections, covering General Wisdom; Pathfinding and Movement; Group Movement, Tactics, and Planning; AI Animation Control; State Machines; Architecture; FPS, RTS, and Strategy AI; Racing and Sports AI; Scripting; Learning; Genetic Algorithms and Neural Networks; Speech Recognition and Dialogue.



Written three years after the second book, in 2006, game programming wisdom 3 explores a whole new landscape for AI, as new technologies have matured. It takes a different style as well, giving an insider?s view on the creation of AI for titles such as Fable, Halo 2, and the Battlefield series.



Organised into 7 sections, this comprehensive volume explores every important aspect of AI programming to help you develop and expand your own personal AI toolbox. You?ll find ready-to-use ideas, algorithms, and code in all key AI areas including general wisdom, scripting and dialogue, movement and pathfinding, architecture, tactics and planning, genre specific, and learning and adaptation.



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Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion
A look behind the making of the computer AI that revolutionised the public opinion of AI back in 1997.

On Intelligence is something of a detractor?s book of AI. In it, author Jeff Hawkins juxtaposes computers and brains to examine what he perceives as the possible futures for artificial intelligences, and makes the claim that all AI experts have got it very, very wrong.




CALO, or Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes is a DARPA artificial intelligence project with an extremely ambitious scope. Even the anagram, CALO is derived from the Latin word "calonis," which means "soldier?s servant."


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The AI Chasers
During the 2007 Singularity Summit in San Francisco, magazine The Futurist spoke with five of the leading voices in modern AI creation: MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks, Adaptive A.I. Inc. founder Peter Voss, Self-Aware Systems founder Steve Omohundro, Powerset CEO Barney Pell, and Google research director Peter Norvig. All were asked about the nearness of artificial general intelligence, and this is the combination of all five interviews.

This book strays from the pack of works on AI, in launching the supposition that the mind is not a basically rational process distorted by emotion, or made more exciting by emotion, and instead embraces emotional states as just a different way to think, an expression of the mind no less valid than rational thought.





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Embodiment (35)

Embodiment is an approach to general artificial intelligence in which the entity has a physical body - a robotic shell that allows interaction with humans in the same environment.
Applicable Dictionary Entries:  
Autonomous Knowledge AcquisitionCognitive AI
Cognitive robotCognitive Robotics
EmbodimentLearning By Imitation
Substrate IndependenceVirtual Embodiment
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3D RoboVision
A team working at Brown University, believe they have made a breakthrough in robotic vision systems: A robot that follows a person from room to room to room, tracking them regardless of lighting conditions, crowds milling between the user and the robot, temporary obstructions or anything.

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A Doll That Can Recognize Voices, Identify Objects and Show Emotion
Industry News

Industry news from 26-08-2005. She's nowhere near the level of the teddy bear from the film A.I., but Amazing Amanda, the first toy to truly take a good stab at synthetic intelligence utilises speech recognition, in-built flash memory, RFID tags and an inbuilt RFID scanner to bring the illusion of intelligence to the playroom.

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AI Cars, Driving Like Hooligans
Stanford's Junior AI, on handbrake skid parking, without a human influence on the system, in dynamic environments, with only a two foot variance in position at 25mph. Or, the first baby steps towards dynamic switching between open and closed loop systems.

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AI Development > LIREC
The LIREC project (Living with Robots and Interactive Companions) is an attempt to help create interactive, emotionally intelligent, synthetic companions which are capable of long-term relationships with human users, and able to move between robot-based interaction and virtual avatar form.

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Artificial Personalities with Artificial Genomes
Rity is a small, cute, blue digital dog. Genderless, Rity is also the first of what is hoped will be a new breed of AI, an AI with emotions and with an emotional personality genome in a novel take on evolutionary algorithms.

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Book Quotes: A Synthespian's AGI
A quote from the VR novel Idoru leads to speculation, and analysis of how a synthespian AI could be constructed - would be constructed.. The logical result is a slightly scary, extremely alien mind structure. Yet, this seems a perfectly feasible form for AGI.

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Book Quotes: The upcoming Idoru and Synthespians
Synthespian creation work is now leading to the creation of the first real Idorus. Robotic pop stars are starting to emerge, which have their own in-built, if still rudimentary AI, stars such as the South Korean EveR2-Muse and the Japanese Kyoko Date (DK96).

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Can robots ever be like humans?
A BBC article which, despite the title, looks into the ability of robots to collaborate and work together to achieve shared goals.

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Crowdsourcing Swarm Control
Rice University's Multi-Robot Systems Laboratory has created an online game designed solely to help further research into swarm control of simple robotic systems. Namely the quest to find truly effective control strategies for their own bespoke r-one swarm robotic system.

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Drone Hacking Shows System Vulnerabilities
A research effort from a University of Texas at Austin has shown the real problems incurred when your drone AI relies near solely on a single sense to the exclusion of all others. In this case, GPS overriding machine vision means that if the GPS is hacked, the drone sees itself slam into a structure but does nothing about it.

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Fujitsu's Robobear
Researchers at Fujitsu in Japan are working hard on an anamatronic teddybear that possesses a degree of artificial intelligence and self-ambulating. It is nowhere near as sophisticated as the robot it is based on - Teddy from AI. But it is well on its way.

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Indoor Totally-Autonomous UAV Plane
Researchers working at MIT have cracked one of the most difficult challenges in autonomous aircraft sensing and AI to crop up since self-piloting aircraft first came about. They have devised a method whereby fast-flying UAV planes can detect their environment and react swiftly enough to be able to fly indoors, dodging both static and moving obstacles as effortlessly as any human pilot could.

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Japanese develop 'female' android
Industry News

28-07-2005, Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised - a female android they have names Repliee Q1.

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Large Image Display: AI: Artificial Intelligence: Teddy
Here we see 'Teddy', the faithful robotic companion of our robotic child protagonist throughout the film. Mum has just taken him out of his box, placed him on the floor, and turned him on. He is revealed here to be a fully articulate, yet still light, soft and furry humanoid robot, intended to double as a teddy bear.

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Multi-Agent automation on the Factory Line
Although use of AI and AGI to give robots minds of their own is something still very much in its infancy, great strides are being made. In this specific case, automation Scientists Fredrik Danielsson and Bo Svensson of University West in Sweden, have created an automation system where such robot arms make their own decisions and adapt to external circumstances.

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Podcast: Hod Lipson: Robots that are "self-aware"
Part of a talk from TED 2007. Hod Lipson demonstrates a few of his little robots, which have the ability to learn, understand themselves and even self-replicate.

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Robotic Insect: Guided by the Same stimuli
For an insect, it is rather large. Six inches in length, and rolling around on tank treds rather than walking. Yet, this German robot is the same as an insect where it counts - in the brain. It possesses an embodied needs-based AI, itself running on a simplified version of the insect brain, and responds to stimuli from the world around it in the self same way a natural insect would.

In the 50 years since the inception of Artificial Intelligence, computer scientists have made remarkable achievements that can be seen in computer games, childrens toys, your home PC and nearly every facet of human life. In this popular approach to understanding AI, David Levy captures the essence, excitement and potential of Artificial Intelligence.



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Self-Driving AI Vehicles In 2010
This report consists of an overview of the state of progress towards general uptake of self-driving vehicles on civilian roads, world-wide, by February 2010. Several projects are discussed, along with their limitations and degree of separation from AI driving on normal roads.

Short Circuit 2 takes place some years after Short Circuit. It catalogues the further adventures of a sentient robot, and his struggle to be accepted as an equal, as a lifeform, by humankind.



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Six ways to build robots that do humans no harm
NewScientist reports on six hypothetical ways to make robotic beings that will not harm humans. Not that any of them are likely to come to pass.

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South Korean robot will walk the walk as well as talk the talk
News from 2006 on the South Korean's attempt to create a robot which not only looks real but talks and moves realistically too.

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The JohnnyCab: Total Recall's Look at AI Vehicles
The Johnny Cab from Total Recall was completely self-sufficient, AI controlled taxi cab. It possessed a motorised mannequin upper torso on a swivel axis inside, so humans had something familiar to interface with. Otherwise it was the very poster child for everything modern AI ground vehicles are trying to achieve.

The Last Mimzy is a story of a future (to us) society?s attempt to utilise time travel to find a solution, to a catastrophic ecological disaster that has destroyed their world. To do this, they employ time travel, and AI.



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The Twilight Zone: The Lonely
A Twilight Zone episode from the late 1950s, comprising of a mix of substrate chauvinism, the psychology of loneliness, artificial intelligence, avatar psychology, and embodiment in one half hour long, blunt and honest package.

Pleo is a robotic dinosaur produced by Ugobe incorporated, an American AI firm. Every Pleo is unique, as each begins with a blank mind and the capability to learn. They are autonomous and will explore and interact with the world you provide for them, as soon as they are switched on. Switch them off, store them, and switch them on again - they will continue from the moment they left off. Once personality traits are embedded, they cannot be removed.



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Will chatting smart cars become a reality soon?
A BBC article looking at the rise of the smart car – AI driven cars that will soon be able to communicate with cloud services for traffic control, communicate with the humans on board, and work in flocks to drive themselves with consideration (and a degree of literal mind-reading) of each other's positions and goals.



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Machine Vision (13)

Applicable Dictionary Entries:  
MoCapMotion-Captured Animation
Neural Network

This book gives senior undergraduate and beginning graduate students and researchers in computer vision, applied mathematics, computer graphics, and robotics a self-contained introduction to the geometry of 3D vision; that is the reconstruction of 3D models of objects from a collection of 2D images.



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Expert System Matches Human Eye in Identifying Artwork
The highly subjective task of critically evaluating artwork for composition, and authorship has always been beyond artificial intelligence systems. It has been believed by some, that it always would be. Times do change indeed.

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Improving LIDAR: Calibrate and Scan
A new technology currently being trialled by the EU, seeks to substantially improve the LIDAR machine vision system's accuracy. To enable the system to differentiate between moving and stationary targets, and prioritise where to scan.

An applied introduction to modern computer vision, focusing on a set of computational techniques for 3-D imaging. Covers a wide range of fundamental problems encountered within computer vision and provides detailed algorithmic and theoretical solutions for each. Each chapter concentrates on a specific problem and solves it by building on previous results.



Written by the creators of OpenCV, the widely used free open-source library, this book introduces you to computer vision and demonstrates how you can quickly build applications that enable AR applications, peripherals and robotics to interpret visual input from cameras, separate out the elements of the scene, and then make decisions based on that data.



A basic problem in computer vision is to understand the structure of a physical sceene from just one or two camera?s perspective. This book attempts to provide a basic background in everything you need to know to be able to create a computer vision system, and train it to deal with the physical world.



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Reverse Engineering The Ability to See
There are a few, albeit exceedingly rare cases, where after a lifetime of blindness, a human's vision is naturally restored. These cases, properly studied, are yielding impressive amounts of data on how a vision system forms in a mature mind - and thus how to recreate the same, in machine vision.

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Robot Researcher For Glass-Glues
Computerised researchers are becoming an increasing trend it would seem. We've seen an increase in recent years of drug-testing robots and automated researchers. Glass researchers are apparently the latest field to be hit with the automation bug.

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Simple Yet Highly Effective Robotic Boost to Mass Spectrometry
A group of biochemists at Georgia Tech had a dream; a dream of being able to automate the process of gathering samples for mass spectrometry. A dream whereby they could just hand the analysis tool a sample. It didn't matter what colour, shape, size, density, or anything it was. The tool would take over and just know how best to approach the problem of obtaining the sample. A nice pipe dream... until the College of Computing at the same university got wind of it.

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SUAVe: Redefining Archaeology With Aerial AI
The SUAVE system is a semi-autonomous UAV, the brainchild of an archaeologist and an engineer. It flies over any dig site, continually taking pictures to convert into a 3D model, reducing the time taken to map a site from painstaking 2-3 years to a single month or less.



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Artificial General Intelligence (12)

Applicable Dictionary Entries:  
AGIAnti Bioism
BioismSubstrate Independence
Theory of Mind

Creative non-fiction guru and seasoned immersion journalist Gutkind observes that just as computers changed the world in the 1990s, robots will transform technology in the near future. To find out who is behind the growing robotic surge, Gutkind spent six years observing life at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute.



Computers are becoming more powerful at an ever-increasing rate, but will they ever become conscious? Artificial intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil thinks so and explains how we will upload our minds and upgrade our bodies to become immortal before the dawn of the 22nd century. In this debate with his critics, including several Discovery Institute Fellows, Kurzweil defends his views and sets the stage for the central question: "What does it mean to be human?"



Artificial General Intelligence or AGI is the holy grail of AI research. Instead of expert systems, and image recognition, it refers to common-sense know-how ? general intelligence most humans have when in unfamiliar situations. In other words, the ability of an AI to think and reason as a sentient being, even when confronted by unfamiliar data.



Franklin's tour of contemporary thought on human, animal, and artificial minds introduces creative theories, models, and prototypes of artificial intelligence. After citing the scoffers' arguments regarding the improbability of fashioning artificial minds, Franklin examines some systems that do, in fact, exhibit aspects of intelligence.



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Book Quotes: Dissecting an AGI on the Net
How do you even begin to tell where a mind begins or ends inside a purpose built network such as a brain? If that seems hard, try determining where a mind that is loose on the net, begins and ends.

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Co-Processors for the Mind: New Directions in AI
The film The Stepford Wives (2004) may be fictional, but it represents an angle that we are now pursuing in our world. Merging man and AI, or more specifically creating AI which can be bonded into the organic brain, such that the two work in harmony to produce something new.

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Large Image Display: Animatrix: The Second Renaissance: Economy of AI
As robot made goods continue to undercut other goods, eventually it reaches the stage where goods made without the use of robots, cannot compete. We saw foreshadowing of this in the 1980s with factory ?robots? that admittedly were nothing more than brainless waldoes operating from a central computer. However, we are starting to see it again as manufacturing robots increase in complexity.