daniel bigham.ca

XNA creators club
October 26, 2008

Wow, am I ever impressed by Microsoft's XNA Creator's Club. What a renaissance for amateur game creators.

"Nearly" passing the Turing Test?
October 13, 2008

http://gizmodo.com/5062385/computer-nearly-passes-turing-test-for-artificial-intelligence

Today I realized just how "gray" the Turing Test really is. I've been aware for some time that a man by the name of Hugh Loebner set up an official Turing Test, but I didn't realize it would be this easy for developers to use smoke-and-mirror techniques to score well on it. It's all a little disappointing, really.

If I were to define a Turing Test, it would involve producing a machine that attained something like a 90% fool rate after sessions with 10 highly trained interrogators which each asked the machine 100 questions. It's the "highly trained interrogators" that is key here.

For example, I can guarantee you that none of the machines tested this weekend would have even a small hope of answering a statement/question such as this:

Question: "I'm thinking of something that is big and round and 6 billion people live on it. What am I thinking of?"

Trained interrogators would ask simple questions such as this, and today, the machines would likely score 0% on a series of 100 questions and attain a 0% fool rate. And that, I think, would demonstrate where we're at!

On the other hand, I think it's good to have a contest that allows the current state of the art to show off and gives researchers something manageable to work towards. But I wish they wouldn't call it the Turing Test, and then start talking about sentient life forms... please...

Technology as art
September 26, 2008

When Meredith and I were in Madrid this summer, there was an exhibit that used technology and the Internet to create a dynamic display that linked keywords on Internet websites against one of a number of topics, which were color coded, and then marked on a world map where that website was located. It was more complicated than that, but what I found interesting was that technology was being used to create art, and it was in an art gallery!

Here's my idea:

Create a visually interesting object such as a polished half sphere which would contain invisible cameras, microphones, and speakers. It would use the cameras to visually track people walking around the room, and when someone came close to the object, it would say, "Hi, what's your name?" in a pleasant voice indistinguishable from a person's. The person would then say something like "Daniel", "Daniel Bigham", "My name is Daniel", etc. and using voice recognition the object would be able to parse what was being said. It would then say "Hi Daniel, nice to meet you".

If the person then walked away and came back, the computer, having tracked the person walking away and coming back, would say, "Hi Daniel". If the person left the room and came back, an attempt would be made to recognize the person based on a visual fingerprint.

To be fun and impressive:

1.	The voice synthesis, and specifically, name synthesis, would need to be nearly perfect, and sound very pleasant, with good intonation.

2.	The system would need to be able to construct names that it hadn't previously heard by analyzing the phonemes spoken, and then to be able to re-speak those phonemes.

3.	The visual tracking algorithms would have to be really good.

I think this would be a neat "art" piece, albeit a bit noisy.

older >>