Apply the same test to politicians. I bet the results are well below 50%.
AI game bot HUNTS DOWN ENEMIES, passes Turing Test
A gaming bot has passed the Turing Test for the first time ever by successfully mimicking the traits of human gamers including irrational grudges and poor aim over long distance. The University of Texas computer scientists behind winning game bot UT^2 – one of the two champions of the BotPrize 2012 competition – coded it to …
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Friday 28th September 2012 07:27 GMT h4rm0ny
Re: Is it a bad sign ...
You have no idea just how lethal a robot killing machine could be. Seriously. There's a mosquito killing device built by a private company (Intellectual Ventures, I have no affiliation) that simply targets them with a camera and zaps them dead with a laser right out of the air. And it does it fast as well. Really fast. You can just turn it on and the poor things just start falling out of the air. It can even tell the difference between types of insect. Now imagine the precision applied to a robot. It could either swap the laser for a gun (imagine something equivalent to a skilled sniper with a powerful rifle that can target and shoot in less than a second and keep doing this every second for as long as you like) or it could keep the laser and just be taught to shoot at people's eyes (contravening international agreements, but the USA and Israel are no strangers to that).
Yes - you'd better invest more in your Robot Apocalypse bunker. The technology on this sort of thing is now pretty much here. It just hasn't really been made cost-effective / reliable enough for the militaries yet. But it will be.
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Friday 28th September 2012 08:32 GMT TeeCee
Re: Is it a bad sign ...
Too damned right. Always makes me laugh when yer SF-movie hero knocks out half a dozen lasers in a corridor or room by diving and firing, while the automated defense systems repeatedly miss him.
If it were real life, he'd be doing a passable impression of a colander before he got to think about the first trigger pull. We already have automated guns (rather slower than lasers, so hitting a moving target is harder) that can turn targets moving at supersonic speeds in their field of fire into swiss cheese pretty much instantaneously.
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Friday 28th September 2012 09:33 GMT Evil Auditor
Re: Is it a bad sign ...
@h4rm0ny: Lasers are already on duty. Their main task may be measuring or target marking but they work just as well in blinding enemies. Not on robots though for that would be against some convention since their main task must not be blinding... What already exists are robot guns. They record the trajectory of a projectile, calculate its origin and fire back. Very quickly, much quicker than you can say 'fuck, it's a robot!'. Not sure though whether such things have been deployed to battle grounds already.
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Friday 28th September 2012 11:42 GMT Ross K
Re: Is it a bad sign ...
There's a mosquito killing device built by a private company (Intellectual Ventures, I have no affiliation) that simply targets them with a camera and zaps them dead with a laser right out of the air. And it does it fast as well. Really fast. You can just turn it on and the poor things just start falling out of the air.
Poor things? I've been eaten alive by the little bastards this year. No sympathy here...
How much does one of these mozzie zappers cost and where can I get one?
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Saturday 29th September 2012 13:48 GMT Irony Deficient
I’ve been down since I began to crawl …
Ross K, you can get one from your shed if you’re ready, willing, and able to invest some blood, tears, toil, sweat, and a few k£. Its cost will depend upon the components that you choose to use.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/backyard-star-wars/0
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Thursday 27th September 2012 18:37 GMT Dave Bell
Re: In games like in real life
It was back in the days of LAN Parties, late last century, when I was watching one of the multi-player combat games of the time: some sort of urban Eastern Front game. It was at a wargames convention and then I saw somebody I knew coming up to the computers, with some of his friends.
I knew he had been in the Army. And I recognised what they did: things like fire and movement, stuff straight out of the training manuals. They worked as a team, while everyone else seemed to be loners.
I wonder how they'd look to the people who judged this competition.
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Thursday 27th September 2012 21:27 GMT F111F
Re: In games like in real life
A few years ago, when my teenage son and his friends started playing games like COD, I tried to explain the "team" concept and it was like talking to stunned mullet...then they learned that kicking serious butt as a team was way more fun than just running around shooting anything that moves (or doesn't). They learned to provide cover fire, securing the high ground, setting ambushes, etc. Sure, every now and then they reverted to type (especially late at night), but that's only to be expected. At least now they are fully trained for the zombie apocalypse.
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Friday 28th September 2012 06:30 GMT Charles 9
Re: In games like in real life
You can usually recognize well-oiled teams straight off, and these are the kinds of teams you usually find at high-level competition. That said, perhaps that'll be one of the next steps in evolving Bot AI: a group of them acting like a realistic team: to the extent that they're also capable of improvisation as the situation arises. It would be an interesting angle to pursue.
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Thursday 27th September 2012 17:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
RoTM, Shirley ?
Checklist for AI-geddon:
1) software that can tenaciously pursue a human (tick);
2) artificial constructs that can *appear* to be human (tick);
3) time travel such that a combination of (1) and (2) ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT STOP (pending, check with CERN team about progress with LHC on this).
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Thursday 27th September 2012 19:16 GMT Robert E A Harvey
Depressing
The narrower the subject matter, the easier it is to pass the test. Limiting case: it is very hard to decide if a human or a machine is solving 3+3.
But it is depressing that our Turing candidate is being assessed on it's Genocidal abilities, rather than - say - playwriting or portraiture
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Thursday 27th September 2012 22:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Optional
The key word is optimal, people don't act in an optimal manner (it's why the army has to train them after all). It's interesting that they are most probably making more complex bots in order to achieve ever simpler behaviour. Still it might go some way to helping with economics and forecasting if we have a better way of modeling non-rational/non-optimal behaviour.
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Friday 28th September 2012 08:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
"We can mimic that behavior"
That's not the same, at least in my mind, as a human being having and irrational response to a situation. Stress from a billion influences can set us off on a irrational path, a bad day at work, the washing up left in the sink, finding your partners undies on the bathroom floor, etc!
However I do welcome better and more flexible bots in FPS, so this can only lead to better things.
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Saturday 29th September 2012 15:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Just another reason to avoid having a World War
When AI Machines are used to wage war, it will be the end of humanity as we know it.
Simply looking at all the Science Fiction stories/movies on the subject will tell you that we don't have a chance. SF has a great track record of foreshadowing the future.
Mark my words, this is coming to a theater of war near you soon and there will be no stopping it.
The remote piloted drones are bad enough, allow them to "think for themselves" and it will get very bad, fast. Putting AI in armored vehicles will be even worse. Try http://iislands.com/hermit/bolo.html for a start.
Yes, these are "stories" about self aware war machines but all the technology is already in place at this time to create them and all that is required is a large scale war for these devices to become reality.
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Sunday 30th September 2012 00:25 GMT The Grump
I, for one, plan to be too drunk to notice as the killing machines put enough holes in me to fill the Albert Hall. Me? Sit in a hole in the ground with expired shelf life MRE's, a chemical toilet, and a sleeping bag ? Not the way I want to go out. If AI-mageddon happens, no one can stop it. Might as well enjoy that last call for drinks, before the bars close - forever.
Bartender, another pint and a bag of peanuts, please.