Where is your head?September 29, 2006
Creating a robot that can converse intelligibly is an idea that science fiction has had a lot of fun with. But writing software that can reliably interpret the English language, and model the processes of human reasoning, is challenging to say the least. A funny human-computer dialog came to mind today... bare with me on this one.
Person: "Hi, my name is George"
Computer: "Hello George"
Person: "George, I have a question for you"
Computer: "What is your question?"
Person: "How tall am I?"
Upon receiving the question, the computer launches into an internal debate about how to answer. Let's listen in on this thoughts:
"Ok, he's asking 'how tall'. That's another way of asking me his
height"
"Height is a
distance"
"Distance is a relationship between two
locations"
"Ok, to calculate the person's height, I'll need to calculate the distance between two locations: The location of his head and the location of his feet"
After thinking for a moment longer, the computer responds:
"Where is your head?":)
Make your own Xbox gameAugust 18, 2006
Microsoft recently released "XNA", which represent a more straightforward way for hobbyists to create their own video games and play them on their PC or Xbox 360.
As a kid I would have been in heaven! It will be interesting to see how successful XNA is. Not having played with it, it's hard to tell, but my gut tells me that something like this could make a big impact.
Original articlePerceiving 3D shapes from 2D imagesJuly 22, 2006
A few weeks ago I was stunned to read
this article. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have made great strides in doing something that I thought was many years off: Teaching a computer to recognize 3D shapes in a 2D image. Although they alude to how they did it, I'd love to time digging into their algorithm. Amazing!
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