Via Hero Complex come these ingenious public service announcements and travel posters from a near future in which time travel is possible and robots are self-cleaning.  Designed by artist Amy Martin, the posters are $20 each and proceeds benefit 826LA, a non-profit writing center for kids 6 to 18.

If you don’t have  time to watch the video you can read recaps and quotes from the panel here, here, here, here and here.

Big thanks to Jennifer at SEE, to all of our panelists, and to the Bad Astronomer, who found time to moderate our panel while he wasn’t partying with Hollywood starlets (Phil – we kid because we love).

Moderator Faith Salie introduced the panelists: Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University; Michael Hogan, also known as Colonel Saul Tigh; Hod Lipson, director of the Computational Synthesis group at Cornell University; Mary McDonnell, a.k.a. President Laura Roslin; and Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England.

Salie asked each panelist to define what a cyborg is. Everyone had different answers: Warwick said it’s something that is part human, Lipson said it’s a moving target or a physical device that takes on biological life, and Bostrom said it’s the essence of human intelligence.

When asked about what research the stars had to do prior to playing their role, Hogan said researching how to be a robot for the part was more about understanding mental illness. “I had irritable shell shock, chronic pain, and was not well–off balance. Lots of people in the world are in chronic pain,” he said.

McDonnell weighed in after experiencing the world of cybernetics for herself through her role in the show: “If we can find a way to use parts of the brain that are dormant, more creative, and less fearful—I would like to be more efficient, more active..”

Warwick, whose research, as well as Lipson’s, served as inspiration for the show, explained how he was creating a biological brain in a petri dish. By applying an external voltage to the dish, he was able to create brain activity. Lipson had a different approach: He tried to breed the robots instead of designing them from scratch. When he showed a short video clip of it, Salie remarked, “It looks like a drunk starfish.”

Warwick said the robots developed in the military right now are designed to destroy humans. “We are now pushing things to act quite negatively towards humans,” he says.

The thought of upgrading our brain is appealing for a number of reasons—or, at least, Warwick thought so, since he had a chip surgically implanted in his brain to link him directly to the Internet. One thing he experienced was the touch of a robot picking up something. “It felt like a hand applying force,” he said. He even had a special necklace made for his wife that was hooked up to his brain, and it lit up to show his mood.

And Bostrom left us with something interesting to chew on: When robot AI reaches the complexity of the human brain, robots should be treated the same as humans, whether or they are based carbon or silicon atoms.

Image: Flickr /Courtesy of the World Science Festival

Meta-conspiracy: Does the government want you to believe in UFO’s? [via Futurismic]

Real-life Terminator robots here, here and here.  [via Technovelgy]

Video of low-altitude flight over the lunar surface by the Japanese KAGUYA explorer [via Pink Tentacle]

Recently released scenes of the upcoming remake of V combine two of our favorite things: creepy aliens and Party of Five! [via thrfeed]

Our first expert-answered Codex question goes to J Storrs Hall, an independent scientist and author who’s also president of the Foresight Institute, a nanotech-oriented think tank. Thanks especially to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the director of SEEx, for connecting us with Hall. Without further ado, here’s the question of the day, asked by an (imagined) big-time Hollywood director/producer who thinks getting the science right might help nail down that elusive Oscar:

“How could nanotechnology transform the world? Most importantly, how could I stop a plague of nanorobots from eating my spaceship/research facility/planet?”

Nanotechnology is going to transform the physical world in much the same way that computers and the Internet have transformed the informational world. In the long run, that means that physical things like cars and houses will see the rates of improvement that we are used to with computers. New capabilities, such as super-light, super-tough materials, will appear.

Existing capabilities that are expensive, such as photovoltaic solar cells, will become cheap enough for everyone to use. In some cases, these both will happen—it might, for example, be possible to surface the roads with photovoltaics that are tough enough to drive on but gather enough energy to power your car as it goes.

The latter half of the 20th Century was one of the most exciting times in the history of science, because it brought the solution to one of the great mysteries: the nature of life. We discovered that the almost magical properties of living things—the abilities to grow, heal, and reproduce—were because they were full of molecular machinery. (The fourth property of life, burning fuel to power useful motion, was captured in the Industrial Revolution.) Nanotechnology research and development is slowly unraveling the principles and techniques by which we will ultimately engineer new molecular machines that will be able to make high-tech products as cheaply and cleanly as biology makes potatoes.

Plagues of nanorobots, under the name of “gray goo,” were first considered in detail by the Nanotechnology Study Group at MIT in the 1980s. Their concern was that these would be mechanical bacteria. Of course, the whole Earth is covered with biological bacteria, just as small, with machinery just as molecular, as anything nanotechnology could ever make. So why was anyone worrying about a few more mechanical ones?

The main worry was that the mechanical version might be more efficient and thus more dangerous. A car can go 10 times as fast as a horse. Perhaps a mechanical bacterium could be faster, tougher, or more efficient than a biological one.

On further analysis, it turned out that the situation wasn’t that simple. Horses eat hay and grain and leaves and other naturally occurring energy sources, while cars need highly refined and expensive fuel. One reason cars are more efficient is that their “digestion” is outsourced to refineries.

Similarly, cars outsource their healing to repair shops and their reproduction to factories. They need roads and other infrastructure to be built for them. Any sensibly designed nanorobot would work the same way, for the same reason: It’s much more efficient. But that leaves the nanorobot, like the car, completely unable to go foraging in the wild and form a “plague.”

Imagine trying to build a car that ran on hay which it harvested itself, graded its own roads, made its own parts with which it repaired itself, and built new cars. Plagues of nanorobots are about as likely as plagues of hay-eating cars. And in the unlikely eventuality someone ever actually did build them, such nanorobots wouldn’t be much more efficient than bacteria, and could be controlled easily by efficient, faster, more powerful, fuel-using, non-reproducing nanomachines.  — J Storrs Hall

What exactly was Kara, and were people chasing down a rabbit hole when they assumed her father was Daniel, the missing 8th model cylon?

Ron Moore: Daniel is definitely a rabbit hole. It was an unintentional rabbit hole, to be honest. I was kind of surprised when I started picking up [that] speculation online.

For those of you who don’t know, there was a deep part of the cylon backstory that had to do with one of the cylons that was created by the final five [called Daniel. Daniel] was later sort of aborted by Cavill… it was always intended just to be sort of an interesting bit of backstory about Cavill and his jealously. A Cain and Abel sort of allegory. Then people really started grabbing on to it and seizing on it as some major part of the mythology. In couple of interviews and in the last podcast I tried to go out of my way to say “look, don’t spend too much time and energy on this particular theory,” because it was never intended to be that major a piece of the mythology.

David Eick: It’s like Boxey in that way!

Moore: Kara is what you want her to be. It’s easy to put the label on her of “angel” or “messenger of God” or something like that. Kara Thrace died and was resurrected and came back and took the people to their final end. That was her role, her destiny in the show… We debated back and forth in the writers’ room about giving it more clarity and saying definitively what she is. We decided that the more you try to put a name on it, the less interesting it became, and we just decided this was the most interesting way for her to go out, with her just disappearing and [leave people wondering exactly what she was].

We see Galactica jump away from the Colony. Are we to assume there are a lot of pissed off Cavills out there still, or were they destroyed?

Moore: The final [cut] came out a little less clear on that than I intended…. It was scripted and the idea was that when Racetrack hits the nukes—the nukes come in and smack into the colony—it takes the colony out of the stream that was swirling around the singularity and [the colony] fell in and was destroyed. I think as we went through the [editing process], when we kept cutting frames and doing this and that, one of the things that became less apparent was that the colony was doomed. The intention was that everyone who was aboard the colony would perish.

At what point did you decide to make it Earth-of-the-past that we were going to wind up on, and what was your reason for that?

Moore: We decided that a couple of years ago. I don’t think we ever really had a version of the show where we [were] in the future or in the present, those didn’t seem as interesting. In the early [development of the show], we would talk about the fact that we would see a lot of contemporary things in the show from language to wardrobe to all kinds of production design details. That only made sense to us in terms of a lot of things that we see in the show and we feel are taken from our contemporary world are actually theirs to begin with. [They] somehow spread down through eons and came to us through the collective unconsciousness. Or, more directly, [as when] Lee said we would give them the better part of ourselves.

Eick: There was a time when we were talking about “they land, and its Pterodactyls and Tyrannosaurus Rex.” But the idea that they were part of the genus of humankind seemed like the right—and more affordable!—way to do that.

Moore: We also had this image of Six walking through Times Square that we came up with long ago.

Who attacked the original Earth?

Moore: The backstory of the original Earth was supposed to be that the 13th tribe of cylons came to that world, started over and essentially destroyed themselves. There was some internecine warfare that occurred among the cylons themselves, which was another repetition in the cycle of “all of this has happened before and all will happen again.” Even they, who were the rebels that split off, [had] enough of humanity in them as cylons that they eventually destroyed themselves.

Why did Cavill decide to kill himself?

Moore: Cavill killing himself actually came from Dean Stockwell [the actor who played Cavill]. As scripted in that final climatic CIC battle, Tigh was going to grab Cavill and fling him over the edge of the upper level and he was going to fall to his death. Dean called me and said “y’know, I just really think that, in that moment, Cavill would realize the jig is up and it’s all hopeless, and he should just put a gun in his mouth and shoot himself.” And I said: “…Okay!”

For the actors, what was the last scene that you filmed and what was the mood like on the set?

Mary McDonnell: My last scene was Laura Roslin’s last moment in the Raptor. That was about 3:45 am on a very small set. I think I was one of the first people to wrap—she died and we all hugged, and my son and I went to the airport and went back to LA… It happened quickly, it was set to happen a week later and the schedule was changed, so suddenly it was over, it was really interesting, very much like the show for me.

Edward James Olmos: My last day was when I was on the mountainside and it was the last moment that I was on camera. It was quite an experience all the way around, that moment in time. I think everybody had a real easy time [acting] with the emotions that we had at the very end, it’s pretty honest all the way around. The last time that I saw Starbuck and Lee was the last scene where I saw them [in the show]. Pretty intense.

McDonnell: But we’re here, and we’re alive! I wore bright blue so you would know I was alive.

With the use of “All Along The Watchtower,” are you trying to get at some notion that there is some universal consciousness that goes back as far as the human/cylon races’ arrival?

Moore: The notion is sort of how you posited it. The music, the lyrics, the composition, is divine, eternal, it’s something that lives in the collective unconsciousness of everyone in the show and all of us today. It’s a musical theme that repeats itself and crops up in unexpected places. Different people hear it and pluck it out of the ether and write songs. It’s a connection of the divine and the mortal. Music is something that people literally catch out of the air and can’t really define exactly how they composed it. [So] here is a song that transcends many eons and many different people and cultures and the stars, and was ultimately reinvented by one Mr. Bob Dylan here on Earth.

Eick: It was a simple way, I thought, to communicate clearly the idea [the show is not set in the future.] That this is a story about a culture that gave birth to ours. There was an episode in season one in which Helo and Sharon are running for their lives. They hole up in a diner and there’s a cylon centurion cornering them. For the longest time we planned to have an old jukebox in the diner that would play “Yesterday”, or whatever we could afford—

Moore: Not “Yesterday.”

Eick: —Probably not “Yesterday.” Something from The Guess Who perhaps. I think we felt it was too soon. It would confuse things and…people would just be thrown by it, but we were thinking about it that far back, that music would be a great way to say to the audience that it follows [a] cyclical theme of “this has all happened before and will happen again.” This culture is the one that gave birth to ours, so that all the colloquialisms and all the slang that you hear and the behavior that is idiosyncratic—playing cards or whatever—we get that from them, not the other way around.

There’s been a lot of talk about how setting an end date for a scripted serial helps to recharge it. Did you find that true?

Moore: In terms of the writers’ room it certainly focused us. We made the decision that fourth season was going to be the last season once we got to the end of the third season. We had writers’ retreats, and we had dedicated sessions to say “this is the end, what’s the last story, what’s the final arc?” It really made everybody very focused and very specific about exactly how this was going to line up. Part of the motivation to make it the final season was that we didn’t want to get to the place where we felt like the ship was keeling over and we were having a problem. We all instinctively felt that the show had the reached the third act by the time the show got to the end of that third season.

Eick: Going back a year before that, Ron and I sat down for our biannual “what the hell do we do this year meeting?” Heading into season three there was a real sense of creative frustration. We wanted to expand the show and … find a new ways [of] story telling. [So season three] became what we call the cylon-centric season. It’s when we introduced the base ship, it’s when we introduced some new cylons. It gave the show life, but after a year of that, when we sat down heading into season four, it was a much shorter conversation. It was basically “okay, what if we end it? What if we just decide it’s over?” Let’s call this…the dovetailing season. If we know that going in, how would that inform story telling decisions?” So it was a very early decision. I remember from my perspective going into that 4th season there was a different energy on the set. There was tremendous focus and concentration that I was getting from the entire ensemble.

McDonnell: Part of what was extraordinary about that is as you are able to view [the end approaching] you can then kick into gear and plot your finish. What that ends up doing is simplifying things for you. You know where your head is and you can let go in many moments were you probably would have worked very hard [before, but] you didn’t need to. So a lot of us felt a kind of simplification. A kind of humility that came over us and that gives you a lot of energy. You just know where you are going and you are proud to be a part of it. And you let go. That was the experience I think many of us had.

Olmos: We had a meeting at the very beginning of the show and we all, 13 of us, sat down in my trailer—

McDonnell: He had the biggest trailer.

Omos: —it was beautiful! And we sat down as we discussed the possibilities. I talked to them about making sure we understood that if, by chance, this situation was to move forward and we were to do this as a series, and this was to go on to for one year, four years, ten years, who knows, that we had to understand what that meant… I just knew that…the story would have a beginning, a middle and an end, and that we had to pace ourselves.

So at the end of the third season, beginning of fourth season, we had a meeting, and we were told then that this was going to be the final season. Everybody got very depressed…I don’t think any of the actors wanted to stop the show… But we had hit the end, we were going into the fourth and final act. And we knew it. So we talked about the very first time we ever got together, and we said it’s like a marathon. In marathon you have to start off fast, really really intensely strong, your first mile has to extraordinary. Then the next 24 miles have to be consistent…. And then the last mile has to be the strongest mile that you’ve run the whole 26 miles…To win it, your final mile has to be your strongest mile… So we knew where we where coming from, we knew where we were, and now we knew where were going… I think that led to some of our strongest performances.

In the last scene, are “Six” and “Baltar” angels or demons?

Moore: I think they’re both. We never try to name exactly what the “Head” characters are—we called them “Head Baltar” and “Head Six” all throughout the show, internally. We never really looked at them as angels or demons because they seemed to periodically say evil things and good things, they tended to save people and they tended to damn people. There was this sense that they worked in service of something else. You could say “a higher power” or you could say “another power,” [but] they were in service to something else that was guiding and helping, sometimes obstructing, and sometimes tempting the people on the show. The idea at the very end was that whatever they are in service to continues and is eternal and is always around. And they too are still around…and with all of us who are the children of Hera. They continue to walk among us and watch, and at some point they may or may not intercede at a key moment.

The Chief being mysteriously pulled toward the Temple of Five?  Turns out he was one of the aforementioned five and had been there before (my apologies if that’s a spoiler for you, but really, catch up already).

BSG is best when it revolves around people and politics, as opposed to the god(s) and the lost tribes of whoever.  Desperate people, dirty spaceships and ragtag resistance movements?  Gripping and relevant TV.  President Roslin’s visions and imaginary shamans?  Not so much.

When I saw Galactica’s hull break open and the Six shoot into space, I was reminded of BSG science adviser Kevin Grazier explaining what happens when you fall out of a spaceship.  We’re hoping for a post from Kevin on the potential explanations for artificial gravity, but we appreciate that the show has a solid science adviser and appears to listen to him occasionally (no aliens, no time travel, real constellations).

With all that in mind here are non-supernatural solutions for my five favorite Battlestar mysteries (note that these are suggestions not spoilers):

1)  The Opera House – Roslin and Baltar are both part Cylon.  If everything happening now has happened before, then it makes sense that human-Cylon hybrids happened before.  Roslin and Baltar can project because they are descendants of the ancient human-Cylon combo.

2) Kara Thrace – An old school Cylon who resurrected after arriving on the irradiated Cylon “Earth.”  She’s the “harbinger of Death” because her return means the end of resurrection and the return of natural reproduction for the Cylons.

3) Earth – Earth as we know it exists apart from the nuked Cylon Earth that the refugees landed on, thereby giving the refugees a final destination.

4) The Defeat of Cavil & Co. – One last rousing space battle for the old man and crew, with an assist from Sam Anders as the hybrid controller of Galactica.  It’s going to be awesome.

5) All Along the Watchtower – Bob Dylan is the creator of the ancestral cylons.

At Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, researchers have adapted a technique using artificial neural networks that can help a robot actively evolve to understand its own body. A neural net tries to mimic the human brain by using discreet processing centers, known as neurones, and letting them link themselves to accomplish programming goals. Sethuraman Muthuraman, in Aberdeen, wanted to make a robot that could teach itself how to walk, regardless of the configuration of its legs. He started with a torso that had two unjointed legs. The robot used a neural net to evolve the means to walk from one point or another by testing different sets of neurone connections and killing them off if they failed. When the robot solved that task, he attached another leg segment to the robot, essentially giving the robot a two sectioned leg with knees. The robot used the original neural net program it had already devised and then added additional neurones  to solve the problem of the newly jointed leg. In this way, the robot taught itself to walk with it’s newly enhanced body.

The whole movement toward self-programming machines is both exciting and a bit unnerving to anyone raised on the original Battlestar Galactica or Terminator movies. Hans Moravec, one of robotics’ pioneers and leading thinkers, argues that artificial intelligence evolution is mirroring the evolution of life, only far faster. In a 2003 talk available online he writes:

I see a strong parallel between the evolution of robot intelligence and the biological intelligence that preceded it. The largest nervous systems doubled in size about every fifteen million years since the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago. Robot controllers double in complexity (processing power) every year or two. They are now barely at the lower range of vertebrate complexity, but should catch up with us within a half century.

He includes  an excellent chart comparing the two rates of growth. He argues that the standard issue G3 Macintosh had the same computing power as a lizard brain, but that it will only be another 20 years before computers with same computational power as the human brain appear on the market. This is not the same as saying there will be human-intelligent robots as that time, since there’s still a long way to go on the programming and theory of AI. Those, he says, won’t come until 2050.

What made this movie stand out for me was how the robot was controlled. The pilot stood in a cokpit in the robots torso. He was attached to the robot by a series of straps that connected directly to the robot through the walls and ceiling. When he moved, the robot moved. Since he was some kind of martial arts super star, his robot was about as fine a defender of the universe as one could hope for, as long as the hero could overcome his psychological issues and fully self-actualize (If you recall the name of this anime, please oh please, comment and let me know what it is).

So, obviously, we still haven’t gotten around to inventing battle bots that can fight our wars for us, but if we did, we’d have a much better system for controlling the robot than silly straps. Motek Medical, a Dutch company, is getting us on our way by devising an optical system that not only does motion capture, but also tracks muscle force and torque. To use the system, dubbed CAREN, users put on a body suit (if you’ve ever seen a behind-the-scenes featurette from The Polar Express, you know what this is) with reflective sensors at crucial joints. Cameras around the room then pick up the location of the sensors and display a skinless body double on a large screen. The computer than applies a model of human motion based on measures conducted by Motek to display which muscles that are in use. Muscles that are in use turn green, and the more intense the green, more force they’re exerting (This video makes it all clear).

Motek has already installed the system in a couple of hospitals around the world to help patients recover from strokes or injury. But combining strapless motion capture with the ability to transmit the force of the muscles also advances the prospect of remote surgery, as well as more efficient remote operated vehicles that could be sent to other planets or to the bottom of the sea floor. And, of course,  it also puts us one step closer to robot karate contests, which would make for some excellent programming on ESPN, if nothing else.

Brook’s thesis is that it’s a bad idea to try to program artificial intelligences from the top down–that is, attempting to create a disembodied A.I. in a computer that then tries to make sense of inputs from the world, e.g. from a video camera, or have its outputs hooked up to control a robot. Instead of starting with the mind, Brooks believes that the robot’s body should come first, and that sophisticated behavior can emerge from the bottom up as a computer embedded in the robot struggles to control its body and interact with the real world. The interaction is critical, as it provides a feedback loop that enables the A.I. to figure out what works and what doesn’t in a way that’s intimately matched to its body and its environment.

In A.I. circles, this idea is known as embodied cognition or embodied intelligence. Brooks and his students have used this approach to build some impressive robots that can accomplish seemingly quite purposeful behavior with limited computational resources. For example, Cynthia Breazel’s Kismet is a robot that convincingly mimics the emotional responses of a small child. But probably the most familiar standard bearer of Brooks’ approach is the humble Roomba, built by iRobot, a company cofounded by Brooks. The Roomba is a robot vacuum, and the first really successful home robot.

In many ways the Roomba is a lot less sophisticated than earlier attempts to build home robots. Navigating around the crowded, irregular, and ever-changing spaces that humans live in is a particular challenge for robots, and many earlier designs featured sophisticated sensors and powerful processors that allowed the robot to build up a map of the rooms it found itself in and chart a path around objects. Instead the Roomba simply works through a small repertoire of movement behaviors, not caring about exactly where it’s going. It detects objects by bumping into them. It monitors the amount of dirt it’s picking up, and once an area appears clean it simply wanders off in a new direction until it finds some more dirt. In this way eventually the entire room is covered. It’s not incredibly efficient, but it’s not you that’s doing the work, it’s the robot, and it gets the job done. The Roomba’s limited intelligence is perfectly matched to the idiosyncrasies of being a vacuum cleaner, allowing iRobot to churn out a successful consumer product instead of getting hung up on trying to perfect the most efficient general purpose robot A.I. possible.

The problem with sending people is that they are a) big b) need to keep eating and c) typically live less than 100 years. The nearest star is 4 light-years away, which means that even if we could travel at the speed of light, it would take four years to get there. Traveling from one end of the galaxy to other at this speed would take about 100,000 years. While time-dilation (which would allow years to pass from the point of view of an observer on Earth, while minutes or seconds pass on-board a ship traveling close to light speed) is sometimes proposed as a way to get around the life-span issue, getting close enough to light speed to produce a significant effect requires huge amounts of energy. The energy problem that becomes incredibly tougher if the spaceship is pretty big to begin with. Realistically, getting any kind of spaceship up to 10 percent of light speed would be an incredible feat, and even 1 percent is far beyond our present abilities.

This leads us to a) and b). Keeping people alive in space currently requires a whole bunch of life-support systems, not to mention the food required. Ways around this problem involve putting people into suspended animation, so that they sleep they whole journey (also sidestepping the life-span problem) or embracing the bigness and putting an entire ecosystem into a bottle inside a huge spaceship and letting several generations live and die as the crew make their way between the stars.

However, if we didn’t have to keep human beings alive — or even in human form — for the journey, the problem becomes easier. Send human DNA (along with a selection of plant and animal DNA) plus a robot that can build an artificial womb instead. A much smaller spacecraft would enable us to boost it to much higher velocities, and we could build lots of them and shoot them off in different directions. Each pod could even build more pods, copying the DNA as well, once it arrives somewhere with suitable raw materials. These daughter pods could be sent off in turn to other star systems. In this way we could colonize the entire galaxy in something like 300-500 million years, which is a long time from a human perspective, but quite short from the galaxy’s.

Around half way through the episode we learn that KITT has been programmed with a self-destruct mechanism by his creator, Dr. Charles Graiman, so there would be a failsafe against KITT going bad. Graiman is familiar with cyborgs gone wild, because he made a KITT prototype named KARR (who is not, as it happens, a car) with the capability to self-program. KARR’s evolution as a learning machine apparently led him to cause the deaths of seven people, though we don’t know how, exactly.

When our heroine, Sarah Graiman, hears about this self-programming robot, she’s incredulous: “That’s impossible!” But where would Sci-Fi be without the autodidact killing machine? We wouldn’t have  The Terminator franchise or Battlestar Galactica, that’s for sure. And besides, as our resident computer genius, Sarah should know that computer scientists have been feeling their way toward self-taught machines for decades.

Evolutionary computation, as the computer scientists call it, is one major technique that has shown real progress in recent years. Perhaps the most famous example was the checkers software designed by Natural Selection, Inc., in 2000. Provided only the rules of checkers, the program used a form of Darwinian natural selection to teach itself winning strategies. Think of each possible solution to a checkers position  as a member of a colony. The computer has each solution play against another solution, killing off the losing strategies as it goes along, and promoting winners. A it evolves successful solutions, the computer got better and better at the game. In the end, it was good enough to defeat casual players and give a good game to experts. And that was eight years ago.

More recently programmers have persuaded computers to become expert Ms. Pacman players and even to learn to speak foreign languages. Really! Researchers at Stanford Uniersity taught a computer to listen for patterns in conversations betwen a mother andher child. The computer listend to conversations in English and Japanese and eventually worked out enought words in each language to speak “baby talk”. Researchers in Germany are trying to teach a humanoid robot to stand up, again just from basic principles. Working with a virtual model, but armed only with a knowledge of physics and the ability to manipulate 15 joints, the computer learns to stand up and do somersaults (The BBC link above has a video).

Researchers have been trying to apply these techniques to make software that writes other software, which represents the next level of self-teaching problem.  The ultimate goal is to have a program that can take parameters from a lay person and generate an application that accomplished what that person needs.  Right now, companies are working with companies to provide software that optimizes shipping schedules, and they’re working with NASA to help the space agency respond to space-based emergencies faster. Progress seems to come in fits and starts every few years, but it really doesn’t seem like we’ll have to wait too long before we, too, can be worried about self-programming robotic killer machines.

As Magnus notes in the episode, similar real-world machines have been used to investigate mysterious passages just 8 inches wide inside the Great Pyramid of Egypt. ROVs differ from autonomous robots like Roomba vacuum cleaners because they are constantly controlled by an operator, typically via a long tether which provides power as well as control signals (and a way to recover the robot if it breaks down). ROVs are often used to explore deep sea environments, and became familiar to many during their starring role in the 1989 first-contact science-fiction movie The Abyss.

The Google Lunar X-Prize is offering $20 million to the first team that can put an ROV on the moon by 2012. There’s no rule against using a fully autonomous robot, but guiding the robot directly from Earth would certainly makes the task easier — during the 1960’s, the Russians remotely operated two Lunokhod rovers on the moon that trundled around surface for about a year and 4 months, respectively — an impressive duration for the robot technology of the time, and even more so when the two-week long lunar nights are taken in consideration. So we can expect the first private robot moon buggy to be something not a million miles removed from Magnus’s little helper.

In the real world, enter Deep Green. Its Canadian creators at Queen’s University in Ontario claim that Deep Green can already play at better than amateur level, and are working to take it up to championship skill levels.

The technical challenges in building such a robot lie in teaching it how to identify the balls, work out where each ball sits relative to the pockets, aim correctly, and implement the strategies that become important at higher levels of play. These challenges have applications to many areas of robotics (a point which I am sure is quite heavily emphasized on the Canadians’ grant applications), and so the game has attracted a number of research groups over the years. However, there is no word yet on building in a feature that will allow any of these machines to nonchalantly convince opponents to bet heavily while pretending it knows nothing, absolutely nothing, about pool.