Thinking Machine 4

Thinking Machine 4 is a cool on-line chess-playing program that shows the moves it is considering.

Three related announcements?

I am starting to notice a lot of development on large-scale, well-funded attempts to make computers answer questions posed in ordinary language. Three in particular are of note:

i) IBM's 'DeepQA' Project: "IBM has unveiled the details of its plans to build a computing system that can understand complex questions and answer with enough precision and speed to compete on America's favorite quiz show, Jeopardy!."

ii.) Stephen Wolfram's Wolfram|Alpha: "Although it’s tempting to think of Wolfram|Alpha as a place to look up facts, that’s only part of the story. The thing that truly sets Wolfram|Alpha apart is that it is able to do sophisticated computations for you, both pure computations involving numbers or formulas you enter, and computations applied automatically to data called up from its repositories." (From the Wolfram|Alpha Blog)

iii.) The Large Knowledge Collider Project: "The aim of the EU FP 7 Large-Scale Integrating Project LarKC is to develop the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC, for short, pronounced “lark”), a platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning that will remove the scalability barriers of currently existing reasoning systems for the Semantic Web."

Will we soon see a leap forward in computer intelligence? Stay tuned! These are exciting times!

[Image from The Large Knowledge Collider Project]

Evolving Mona Lisa

This guy wrote a genetic program (a computer program that uses natural selection to solve problems) that simulated/replicated the Mona Lisa using 50 semi-transparent polygons. I wonder if any human would have been able to figure out how to do that?

Shown: The 348th and 904,314th generations of evolution.
Via: BoingBoing

World champs on-line

The University of Alberta GAMES computer science group lets you play a bunch of games online against their computer programs. However, be warned: their programs are very very good (in some cases world champions)! You will lose!

The Second Man-Machine Poker Competition

Last year, the University of Alberta's Poker Playing program, Polaris, was narrowly defeated by top human poker players. The re-match is about to begin! The way they set this up is very clever. The machine plays 500 hands against a human, while at the same time in another game, it plays against a different human with the hands flipped (so the computer gets the hands the other human got, and the human gets the hands the computer got). This is clever because it eliminates any element of luck: both humans and the computer play exactly the same hands against exactly the same hands. Will machine triumph over man? Tune in July 4-6, 2008.