The purpose of this blog is to keep you in touch with the latest artificial intelligence reports,researches and inventions with the latest technology and computer reviews of latest games and much more about I.T universe.
Programming computers to play games has been central to Artificial Intelligence research since its early days back in the fifties. By now, most of us have heard of IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer defeating world chess champion Garry Kasparov in the game of chess and becoming the first ever computer to defeat man in this very complex game. Less than 3 years ago, we wrote about Jonathan Schaeffer's unbeatable checkers program known as Chinook; it took the researchers in Schaeffer's group 18 years to explore enough of the search space to solve the game of checkers. The same group is now trying to develop expert poker playing programs and recently they organized the first ever man-machine poker challenge (man was the winner of this first encounter.)
However, few people know about the first ever chess playing program.
This program was designed by no other than the famous British mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing. Starting in 1948, Turing wrote the program in collaboration with D.G. Champernowne, a former undergraduate colleague of his. Four years later in 1952, when it was time to have a match against a human opponent, Turing had no access to a computer fast enough to execute his state-of-the-art program and so he did what every one of us would do in the same situation; he simulated the program using pen and paper requiring half an hour of computation for each move!
The game was won by the human participant Alick Glennie who was another of Turing's colleagues. Alick defeated the computer in 29 moves playing the black pieces.
If you are a chess enthusiast, you can check out the full game here. The image at the top of this post shows the board at its conclusion.
FuRo Robotics‘ Wireless Intelligent Networked Device (WIND) is a system that allows for the control of robotic devices through the use of a wearable harness. The harness detects and tracks the movement of the wearer, translating it into commands for a remotely controlled machine that mimics human action.
Thermaltake offers the BlacX 5G USB 3.0 hard drive docking station. The BlacX 5GB works with both 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SATA I/II/III hard drive or SSD up to 2TB and supports hot-swapping.
The Thermaltake BlacX 5G supports plug-and-play. It is backward compatible with USB 2.0/1.1.
A latest invention by MIT Media Lab is a new robot that is able to show various facial expressions such as 'slanting its eyebrows in anger', or 'raise them in surprise', and show a wide assortment of facial expressions while communicating with people.
This latest achievement in the field of Robotics is named NEXI as it is framed as the next generation robots which is aimed for a range of applications for personal robots and human-robot teamwork.
DESIGNING
The head and face of NEXI were designed by Xitome Design which is a innovative designing and development company that specializes in robotic design and development. The expressive robotics started with a neck mechanism sporting 4 degrees of freedom (DoF) at the base, plus pan-tilt-yaw of the head itself. The mechanism has been constructed to time the movements so they mimic human speed. The face of NEXI has been specially designed to use gaze, eyebrows, eyelids and an articulate mandible which helps in expressing a wide range of different emotions.
The chassis of NEXI is also advanced. It has been developed by the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics UMASS (University of Massachusetts), Amherst. This chassis is based on the uBot5 mobile manipulator. The mobile base can balance dynamically on two wheels. The arms of NEXI can pick up a weight of up to 10 pounds and the plastic covering of the chassis can detect any kind of human touch.
CYNTHIA BREAZEAL: HEAD OF THE PROJECT
This project was headed by Media Lab's Cynthia Breazeal, a well known robotics expert famous for earlier expressive robots such as Kismet. She is an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT. She named her new product as an MDS (mobile, dextrous, social) robot.
FEATURES OF NEXI
Except a wide range of facial expressions, Nexi has many other features. It has self-balancing wheels like the Segway transporter, to ultimately ride on. Currently it uses an additional set of supportive wheels to operate as a statically stable platform in its early stage of development. It has hands which can be used to manipulate objects, eyes (video cameras), ears (an array of microphones), and a 3-D infrared camera and laser rangefinder which support real-time tracking of objects, people and voices as well as indoor navigation.
