Nintendogs for the DS was a brilliant game. Its premise — pick a puppy and nurture it to adulthood — played on the digital pet theme that has driven high sales from Tamagotchi to Pikachu, and let you teach your dogs fancy tricks and skills that would improve over time, almost like it was learning.
But it wasn’t. A Nintendog’s behaviors were scripted, its personality restricted to a handful of breeds. On the other hand, Novamente, a company that aims eventually to develop a super-smart artificial intelligence (AI), says that its current technology will make such limitations remnants of the past.
The company claims that its virtual dogs, seeded only with basic skills and the desire to get food, water and rewards from their owners, will try almost anything to achieve these ends, including spontaneous behavior that was not written directly into the code. And dogs are just the beginning.
It might start out sitting and rolling over, but if that didn’t earn it some kibbles or praise, it would start to experiment. It might suddenly attack another avatar, bark at virtual squirrels, chase its tail or climb into its owner’s lap. If it watched its owner’s avatar hiding food behind a couch whenever another avatar was around, it might start hiding its food. If the owner jumped up and down every time they greeted the dog, the dog would follow suit, as long as the feedback was positive.
The primary limits on these virtual dogs’ possible actions, says Novamente founder Ben Goertzel, would come from the range of available animations and interactions with other virtual characters and objects, not from Novamente’s AI. But, as animations are not Novamente’s forte, this part will be a challenge. Its focus is on creating and enhancing a virtual brain.
Let’s build machines that can think.
There are a few companies trying to create human-level intelligence in a machine, also known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. The one with the most buzz is Numenta. Founded by Jeff Hawkins, who also founded Handspring and Palm, Numenta is trying to build an AGI modeled on the human neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for spatial intelligence, perception, motor functions and language. Its goal is to take this model and apply it to problems that require sophisticated pattern recognition, like machine vision, robotics and data mining and analysis.
Novamente’s Goertzel says that a human-level AGI could be developed in a matter of years and that he has designed a framework in which to develop it. Built over the last seven years, the Novamente Cognition Engine uses a modular architecture designed to let specific specialized parts of the engine — some for memory, some for learning, some for language — guide every process but simultaneously distribute each one across the entire system.
See this diagram below.
While Goertzel says that he has developed a theoretical framework and a system architecture that can enable a super-smart machine, he acknowledges that the hugely ambitious project still has a ways to go. Without substantial funding, Goertzel admits, Novamente will not be able to build the AI on its own.
The company has thus decided to make major parts of the Novamente Cognition Engine available as open source. This project, called OpenCog, received a small boost in January when the Singularity Institute, to which PayPal founder Peter Thiel is a major donor, agreed to pay two engineers to work on the project full time for a year. In June, Google, itself, decided to sponsor 10 OpenCog interns (mostly PhD candidates) for the summer. And on Friday, Novamente launched OpenCog Prime, a wiki that documents Goertzel’s entire vision — the theory, the architecture, and documentation on nearly everything that has been built so far. Read the rest of this entry »



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