Android Technology

2094 Views 22 Replies 9 Participants Last post by Steel, Apr 2, 2005

Seta-San

Discussion Starter · Feb 21, 2005

I was wondering if anyone here is actively interested in androids. There are currently a couple very promising projects.

There's Valerie here
http://www.androidworld.com/prod19.htm

and There's this from the Kokoro Project.
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp/movie7.html

The one from the Kokoro can only do facial expressions and upper body movements but cannot walk and i can find no evidence that it can do any tasks.

Valerie looks like a Maniquin but can do almost any household labor that a human can do. It cannot do anything outside due to the fact it's reliant on an AC adapter.

1 - 20 of 23 Posts

WindHydra

· #2 · Feb 21, 2005

Housework... hmm... the kind that breaks everything so you have to throw everything away, and ends up with a nice, clean house?

moomoomoo

· #3 · Feb 21, 2005

It's all a load of poo. Check out the 'AI Programming Example':

http://www.androidworld.com/prod69.htm

The project isn't promising at all, it's a load of bull**** on a terribly designed page. I fear for the sanity of those he's fooled.

Seta-San

Discussion Starter · #4 · Feb 21, 2005

valerie is still being made according to the guy i emailed. also that code looks psudocode not something the android would actually use.

moomoomoo

· #5 · Feb 21, 2005

Seta-San said:
valerie is still being made according to the guy i emailed. also that code looks psudocode not something the android would actually use.

Are you stupid?! It won't work! You've been fooled by a dressmakers dummy! Check back in 100 years and you might have an android that works. Well see you later guys, I'm going to give my good pal Dr Frankenstein a call and see if he wants to stick some limbs together on the weekend to make another monster. Because that really works, Seta-San. Oh yes it does.

GeneralClaymore

· #6 · Feb 21, 2005

you don't know if its not gonna happen. never known, it may happen soon , we will find out when it time, it may happen less then 100 yrs no one know for sure.

And Your a Admin you shouldn't be calling people Stupid, or calling people dummy shame on you. Act how you want others to treat you

.

Boltzmann

· #7 · Feb 21, 2005

I do take a interest in androids, but these guys you mentioned are crackpots, as moomoomoo pointed out.

But to state that human-like androids will never be a possibility (or only after a hundred years) is wrong as well. Many computer scientists and engineers working with robotics today think that such developments will occur much sooner (see Hans Moravec if you want an even more optimistic estimate).

For instance, Robot makers say World Cup will be theirs by 2050. Those guys are real scientists and engineers, and they've been pushing the technological envelope farther every year. Many other teams exist around the world right now, pursuing this goal. Hans Moravec recently founded a company with this purpose (read the article: You, Robot .

Personally, I do want to see robots doing all of our work while we go off in a permanent vacation.

WindHydra

· #8 · Feb 21, 2005 (Edited)

GeneralClaymore said:
And Your a Admin you shouldn't be calling people Stupid, or calling people dummy shame on you. Act how you want others to treat you .

But it IS pretty dumb to believe we will get that kind of robots in the near future

(50 years is not near enough!) Unless you are around 10 I guess... I used to be waiting for robots

Look at how the guy simplified the tasks... he didn't mention how much stuff goes into one simple task. There will be lots of things to program for verbs like "walk" and "scrap", yet his commands are "Clear the dinner table if necessary"...? :nono:

Boltzmann

· #9 · Feb 21, 2005

WindHydra said:
Look at how the guy simplified the tasks... he didn't mention how much stuff goes into one simple task. There will be lots of things to program for verbs like "walk" and "scrap", yet his commands are "Clear the dinner table if necessary"...? :nono:

Most people unfamiliar with cognitive science make this kind of mistake. They tend to ignore the vast ammounts of accreted complexity that composes our cognitive architecture. We're the result of millions of years of evolution, and concepts such as "walk" or "clean" are partly hardwired in our brains (not the words, of course, but the concepts they represent). If it were not for this shared cognitive complexity, communication among humans would be essentially impossible, as Chomsky, Pinker and others have demonstrated several times.

Those concepts got hardwired in our brains because they're recurrent aspects of reality and at some point in our evolutionary history they helped to increase our reproductive fitness.

Saying "clean this table" to a robot without the appropriate cognitive structure would be pointless. It'd be just like trying to code a computer program in plain english. A useless, and impossible, endeavor.

nahteecirp

· #10 · Feb 21, 2005

Wait a second, from what I can tell the Valerie is supposed to be able to walk and do all sorts of precise movements that things like washing dishes requires and have intelligent conversations? How can they do all this for only $30000 when the ASIMO robot thats cost billions of dollars is just starting to do this? (this is a rhetorical question

)

Proto

· #11 · Feb 23, 2005

For instance, Robot makers say World Cup will be theirs by 2050. Those guys are real scientists and engineers, and they've been pushing the technological envelope farther every year. Many other teams exist around the world right now, pursuing this goal. Hans Moravec recently founded a company with this purpose (read the article: You, Robot .

That is one of the head premises of the Robocup world cup. In fact an android league was recently added to the contest, and right now we are seeing the first results of this efforts

For example, right now the playing speed of the robots in the mini robot cathegory is so fast that humans can no longer compete with them with robots controlled via joystick. Certain universities (like a prototype I saw in a presentation yesterday from the Free University of Berlin) already show astonishing team work and movement prediction algorithms, to the point of a central computer anticipating the movement of its enemies and predicting the ball position, which leads to astonishing teamwork strategies generated in real time.

In the cathegory we are working right, the legged one (we work with Sony's AIBO's here, they are those funny puppies you might have seen) each individual player has it's own processor, the central computer only serves as a way of communication. Although the decision algorithms on this area aren't that developed (at least on our team

) the vision and movement algorithms we have achieved are complex enough to precisely detect and recoginize the enemie/companion/field possision and distribution, all this with a very limited sensor system (namely the ****ed up camera the old AIBO's had.... fortunately the new model arrived yesterday

)

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Boltzmann

· #12 · Feb 23, 2005

Proto said:
For example, right now the playing speed of the robots in the mini robot cathegory is so fast that humans can no longer compete with them with robots controlled via joystick. Certain universities (like a prototype I saw in a presentation yesterday from the Free University of Berlin) already show astonishing team work and movement prediction algorithms, to the point of a central computer anticipating the movement of its enemies and predicting the ball position, which leads to astonishing teamwork strategies generated in real time.

This is awesome, specially considering that those robots are far from achieve anything resembling general intelligence. This still makes it an impressive progress, and perhaps a step in the right direction for creating AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).

Proto said:
In the cathegory we are working right, the legged one (we work with Sony's AIBO's here, they are those funny puppies you might have seen) each individual player has it's own processor, the central computer only serves as a way of communication. Although the decision algorithms on this area aren't that developed (at least on our team ) the vision and movement algorithms we have achieved are complex enough to precisely detect and recoginize the enemie/companion/field possision and distribution, all this with a very limited sensor system (namely the ****ed up camera the old AIBO's had.... fortunately the new model arrived yesterday )

Cool, I didn't know you were woking with those robots. The AIBO is cool, although I think that that Honda's ASIMO is even cooler.

It'll be quite ironic when robots finally play soccer better than humans. We'll see the end of those mindless players making millions of dollars just to kick a ball while grown-up men pay to watch

Proto

· #13 · Feb 23, 2005

Cool, I didn't know you were woking with those robots. The AIBO is cool, although I think that that Honda's ASIMO is even cooler.

I agree with you here, but SONY is the big sponsor of out cathegory so bleh.. We will have to do with this almost-blinded thingies

(well the ESR-7 isn't that bad I guess...)

It'll be quite ironic when robots finally play soccer better than humans. We'll see the end of those mindless players making millions of dollars just to kick a ball while grown-up men pay to watch

Ditto. And with some luck people will grow tired of it and will eventually search for something more interesting to do

PS: What's up with the running Megaman in everyone's signature? Is it something against me? ProtoMan is better than MegaMan you know

Boltzmann

· #14 · Feb 23, 2005

Proto said:
I agree with you here, but SONY is the big sponsor of out cathegory so bleh.. We will have to do with this almost-blinded thingies (well the ESR-7 isn't that bad I guess...)

Yeah, go where the funding is

It's good enough that they're willing to sponsor someone

Proto said:
Ditto. And with some luck people will grow tired of it and will eventually search for something more interesting to do

I hope this happens too, but that would be just wishful thinking

Proto said:
PS: What's up with the running Megaman in everyone's signature? Is it something against me? ProtoMan is better than MegaMan you know

Check this thread

And join the fun yourself

Grv

· #15 · Feb 25, 2005

Boltzmann said:
Saying "clean this table" to a robot without the appropriate cognitive structure would be pointless. It'd be just like trying to code a computer program in plain english. A useless, and impossible, endeavor.

Next thing we know, military ninja/commando hybrid droids are under "development".

If enemy is close, attack enemy. :lol:

WindHydra

· #16 · Feb 25, 2005

This running megaman theme is fun

Steel

· #17 · Apr 2, 2005

Isn't it far more likely however that human sports teams would just be replaced by robot ones?

However the thought of General AI is kind of scary. Robots (if they are sturdily built) could easily kill humans if they decide we shouldn't exist. Also if they had weapons (i.e. guns) it would be even worse, as they would rarely miss. I think it's great and all that we can most likely eventually create intelligent life, however I think it should be approached with extreme caution.

Proto

· #18 · Apr 2, 2005

How so? If we manage to create something intellectually better than ourselves then we would have fulfilled our purpose in the evolution chain, in a good way because we constructed it the way we wanted. After that we would just be outliving our specie's span :nod:

Well then again that's only my POV, even other pro AI people strongly disagree with me so bleh

Steel

· #19 · Apr 2, 2005

That doesn't seem to make any sense, Proto. What you're saying is just because they are intellectually better than ourselves, they are more worthy to exist?? And we may construct the robots but it doesn't necessarily mean we created them in the way we wanted.

Proto

· #20 · Apr 2, 2005 (Edited)

That doesn't seem to make any sense, Proto. What you're saying is just because they are intellectually better than ourselves, they are more worthy to exist??

Exactly, I value human existance according to its intelligence. (or indirectly, according to it's usefulness and capability to improve his environment)

Obviously I'm not saying that we should be completely and painfully obliterated after the AI singularity comes. Moreover, I highly doubt that an intelligence that would have already vastly surpassed us would use such rash and barbaric methods. However, I have to see I tend to get quite annoyed when people fear AI investigation on the basis that they may someday surpass and kill us

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