Artificially Intelligent Machines Gain Ground
Aug. 13, 2001 -- If the people of Seattle seemed a little uncomfortable last week, they had good reason. The word on the street is that they’re on the way out.
From Aug. 2-10, Seattle’s Washington State Convention and Trade Center hosted two major events in the world of artificial intelligence: the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAA), and RoboCup 2001, a tournament featuring autonomous soccer-playing robots, sponsored by ICJAA.
Scientists from around the world converged on the city to showcase the latest advances in thinking machines. Judging by the research presented, journalists and commodities traders may be the first to go.
Reporter of the Future
Charles Callaway and James Lester, researchers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, showed off an intelligent software system called Author that is already able to write convincing fairy tales.
The program, which was originally developed to help children overcome reading problems, generates new fairy tales by changing details about the characters, props, and plot in existing stories. When given a story plan consisting of characters, scenes, and the order of events, Author will string these facts into sentence-like groups and automatically apply a series of logic rules to turn them into grammatically correct sentences.
Given a different set of story templates and a few years of work, Callaway and Lester said Author could be adapted to write newspaper stories.
The researchers told conference attendees that they foresee Author being joined with automated summarizers — programs that extract information from text — to create a robotic reporter that would scan news wires or government papers for the bare facts of a story.
Such programs already exist in basic form, said Daniel Marcu, a researcher at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California in Marina del Rey. But Author, Marcu said, is by far the best at generating readable prose, and the only one that can write stories more than a couple of paragraphs long.
My Trader, The Robot
Software that can write is impressive enough, but nothing is sure to generate interest faster than a program that can make big bucks. That’s where Jeffrey Kephart comes in.
A scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y., Kephart has developed a robotic software agent, or bot, that made more money trading commodities than humans doing the same job.
Kephart presented research that pitted six bots against six human traders who normally make a living buying low and selling high. Half were buyers, who were given an upper spending limit, and half were sellers, who had a minimum sales price. In a non-biased, software-based auction, the bots made 7 percent more money than the humans, Kephart told the audience.
“The impact might be measured in billions of dollars annually,” he said.
Eventually, Kephart says, software bots could replace people in making these types of trading-based financial decisions for business.
Robot Athletes
The suit-and-tie set won’t be the only ones polishing off resumes. Mia Hamm and the gang could soon start pondering new careers as well.
While conference attendees presented their research upstairs, downstairs, on the Trade Center floor, teams of autonomous robotic athletes battled on makeshift soccer fields for the RoboCup 2001 championship.
The event, which featured four different leagues for different types of robots, is intended to showcase and stimulate research in artificial intelligence and robotics. Humanoid robots in the tradition of C3PO served amused onlookers hors d’oeuvres.
Don’t Call Them Master Yet
Despite the various and impressive forms of artificial intelligence on display in Seattle, don’t start practicing bowing to your robot masters just yet, the researchers said.
Author developer Callaway said the writing program isn’t quite ready to join the ranks of Walter Cronkite. For one thing, Author still lacks a very basic skill: the ability to distinguish fact from fiction.
And while bots could eventually replace traders in commodity auctions, Kephart of IBM said the boss will still be flesh and bone.
“We see agents being down there in the frenzy of the trading pit while humans are elevated to a more managerial role,” Kephart said.
Moreover, RoboCup organizers said, you won’t be seeing any robots endorsing Nike for several decades. Organizers said their goal is to develop a team of autonomous soccer bots that can beat the FIFA World Cup champions — humanity’s best — ;by 2050.