Wednesday, March 3, 2004
w00t!
Ashoura Day
Shiite Muslim child Mahmoud Slieman after his mother cut him with a sword during the annual ritual to mark Ashoura Day in the southern Lebanese town of Nabatiyeh, Tuesday March 2, 2004. Ashoura day marks the Shiite Muslim's commemoration of the 7th century killing of their most revered Saint Imam Hussein. Al Hussein was a grandson of Islam's prophet Mohammed and is a symbol of martyrdom for Shiites. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)
Home Robot 4 U
A ZMP Inc. employee demonstrates nuvo, a humanoid robot, during a news conference in Tokyo.
The 39-cm-tall, 2.5-kg robot, named nuvo, will come in the wake of the releases of consumer-oriented robot dogs such as Sony Corp.'s AIBO.
ZMP Inc., which developed nuvo, said it started accepting orders Tuesday from research institutes for a 3 million yen model developed for them, and will sell a mass-production model for general consumers.
Nuvo, which can walk, stand up and react to human speech, also features remote control technology used in NTT DoCoMo Inc.'s FOMA mobile phones.
If consumers want to use the robot as a house-sitter, they can program its camera to photograph their homes and send the images to a mobile phone, said ZMP, which calls itself the world's first venture specializing in humanoid robot development.
ZMP said the robot wears special shoes that were developed in a tieup with sporting goods maker Mizuno Corp. The shoes act as shock absorbers, it said.
Previously released humanoid robots such as ASIMO, developed by Honda Motor Co., and Sony's QRIO, have been used in publicity events and are not sold to general consumers."
Tuesday, March 2, 2004
RFID Tags in New US Notes Explode When You Try to Microwave Them
Dave and I have brainstormed the fact that most items can be 'microwaved' to fry the 'rfid' chip, thus elimination of tracking by our government.
So we chose to 'microwave' our cash, over $1000 in twenties in a stack, not spread out on a carasoul. Do you know what exploded on American money?? The right eye of Andrew Jackson on the new twenty, every bill was uniform in it's burning... Isnt that interesting?
What we resent is the fact that the government or a corporation can track our 'cash'. Credit purchases and check purchases have been tracked for years, but cash was not traceble until now...
Monday, March 1, 2004
Can Porn Pass the Turing Test?
"At first glance spam, pornographic text messages and video games are not contributing much to human development. But a good case can be made for regarding all three as some of the smartest artificial intelligences around. Some may even have beaten the legendary 'Turing Test' by convincing thousands of people that they are human... But the best candidate for passing the Turing test is the Natachata program that conducts smutty conversations via text messages. Regular users of pornographic SMS chat may be shocked to find out that they are swapping dirty talk with machines rather than young women and men. But it's a fair bet that they are because the Natachata chatbot, written by former rocket scientist Simon Luttrell, is so widely used by porn chat merchants... 'Most people do not realise it's a computer and are quite happy chatting with it,' said Mr Luttrell... Some users work out it is a machine, he said, and never come back. But, worryingly, some like the fact that it is a machine. 'There is about 5% who realise it is a computer and use it even more because of that,' said Mr Luttrell." — BBC (UK)
It's no revelation to say that the Information Age could also be called The Age When Sex Became Technology. Contemporary technologies have opened up new venues for erotic activity — is sex fundamentally just another form of information? — and conversely lust has fueled some of the most innovative uses of new technology. Accordingly, should it be any surprise if the Turing test, the benchmark established by mathematician Alan Turing to determine if a computer possessed "human" intelligence, should finally be conquered by some kind of sex machine? Will the hallmark of Artificial Intelligence be dirty talk?
The article makes the claim that porn spam poses a challenge to the Turing test. When a clever subject header gets you to open an email, the argument goes, has the computer-generated spam not tricked you into thinking that it is human? This hardly seems true, for several reasons. First, most people learn to recognize spam headers for what they are (is anyone really fooled by "V|i_a|g-a|r_a?"). Second, though most spam is sent by software programs, many of the headers are composed by humans (precisely in an attempt to get you to read it). Third, the Turing test stipulates that a machine only passes the test by fooling a (real) person into thinking that it (the machine) is a human during the course of a conversation — and spam hardly amounts to a conversation. You can't interact with somebody who hides behind a million email addresses they buy on CD-ROM for $29.99.
But what about this bot that does porn chat? Apparently it is as convincing as it is clever. It compares your dirty talk to a large database of sexy sentences and works out the right response. It also incorporates a random delay into its responses, so that you don't get the feeling you're being talked up by a stock ticker. The article quotes "Barry" asking the bot if it's a virgin, and the bot responds "As far as you're concerned, barry, I always will be." Pretty good — but does it really pass the Turing test?
The funny thing about dirty talk, of course, is that it represents an extremely small subset of the possibilities of human conversation. A database of a hundred thousand sentences probably contains just about everything that can be said in ninety-nine percent of porn chat. What are you wearing, how old are you, where are you based, what do you look like, what gets you off, etc — it's not a huge programming task to cover this finite case of scenarios. However, once you move outside this restricted subset of possibilities, could such a bot really fool a human? It hardly seems likely, since it would require a database the scope of the entire internet (and then some) to anticipate the variegated types of conversation two people could have. A real conversation might bounce from necrophilia to biotech futures, trial litigation to Chaucer, bone spurs to local politics — and how could you humanly account for all that in a database?
If anything, the relative success of this bot during porn chat suggests not that the software is so intelligent but that its (human) interlocuter is, at least temporarily — dumb. What dumbs us down more than lust? Given the lowering of intelligence that accompanies the ascendance of the libido, a dog could probably pass the Turing test with a sufficiently horny man.
[via PervScan]