Learning to communicate and adapting our behaviour to the information we receive has been fundamental to human evolution. If machines could do the same the intelligent talking robots of science fiction could become the stuff of science reality, as scientists aim to prove.

Most research into the Artificial Intelligence (AI) that underpins any form of intelligent machine-machine or machine-human interaction has centred on programming the machine with a set of predefined rules. Scientists have, in effect, attempted to build robots or devices with the communication skills of a human adult. That is a shortcut that ignores the evolution of language and the skills gained from social interaction, thereby limiting the ability of AI devices to react to stimuli to within a fixed set of parameters.

But a team of scientists led by the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology in Italy are taking a new approach to the problem, developing technology to allow machines to evolve their own language from their experiences of interacting with their environment and cooperating with other devices.

"The result is machines that evolve and develop by themselves without human intervention," explains Stefano Nolfi, the coordinator the ECAgents project, which, with financing from the European Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative, has brought together scientists from disciplines as diverse as robotics, linguistics and biology.

Teaching a robotic dog new tricks.

The technology, dubbed Embedded and Communicating Agents, has allowed scientists at Sony's Computer Science Laboratory in France, for example, to add a new level of intelligence to the AIBO dog. Instead of teaching the dog new tricks, the algorithms, design principles and mechanisms developed by the project allow the robotic pet to learn new tricks itself and share its knowledge with others.

"What has been achieved at Sony shows that the technology gives the robot the ability to develop its own language with which to describe its environment and interact with other AIBOs - it sees a ball and it can tell another one where the ball is, if it's moving and what colour it is, and the other is capable of recognising it," Nolfi says.

The most important aspect, however, is how it learns to communicate and interact. Whereas we humans use the word 'ball' to refer to a ball, the AIBO dogs start from scratch to develop common agreement on a word to use to refer the ball. They also develop the language structures to express, for instance, that the ball is rolling to the left. This, the scientists achieved through instilling their robots with a sense of 'curiosity.'



Posted by: John    Source