

Robots Invent Their Own Spoken Language - eguizzo
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/lingodroid-robots-invent-their-own-spoken-language

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andrewcooke
or: robots use pre-programmed algorithm to assign randomly generated tags to
emergent regions.

the cool thing here isn't "inventing a language"; it's that the system
stabilises with different areas having different, consistent labels. the
algorithm used to do that is based on social interactions. and this _is_ cool.

"language" comes into it only in that the randomly-generated labels are
encoded using phonemes and communicated via speaker/microphone.

it's sad that, when there is something cool, people still feel the need to
introduce a gimmick.

[edit: it just occurred to me that maybe the cool bit has already been done by
someone else, and all this work does is add the sound-based communication; i
hope not!]

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dkarl
I think it's pretty cool that they constrained the robots to using human
phonemes, because the investigators can actually listen and observe while the
robots are talking. It might be more scientifically rigorous to prevent that
kind of informal observation when testing a hypothesis, but they might learn
something this way that will generate new ideas and new hypotheses to test.

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scott_s
This kind of research is more exploratory engineering than it is science. As
someone who does this sort of thing [1], we don't really have a hypothesis and
are looking for data to support that hypothesis. We have an idea - "Hey! I
think we can get this cool thing to work!" - and then we grind away at
implementing it until what we have is cool enough to show off. This is
fundamentally different than pure science because we're not actually testing a
hypothesis or a theory. (If you're thinking "What about the hypothesis, it's
possible to do X?" well, that's a pretty weak hypothesis.)

Yeah, we have experiments, but those are used to show that technique _X_ is
better than technique _Y_ when using metric _Z_. We're not improving our
fundamental understanding of how how the universe works, we're improving our
ability to build things - either by demonstrating a new technique to achieve
an old thing, or by demonstrating that an entirely new thing is possible.

[1] Not robots or machine learning, but computer science research in general.
I do high performance computing and systems research.

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GrooveStomp
You know, before reading your post I never even questioned that I had a
strongly scientific leaning in my mentality. Now I realize I'm much more of an
exploratory engineer than a scientist. Actually, now that I think about it,
haven't there been a great number of scientific discoveries that were,
according to your distinction, actually exploratory engineering? I would think
that following all the side-effects and byproducts of rigorous scientific
study would qualify as exploratory engineering, wouldn't they?

Anyway, interesting perspective. Particularly on point, as I just finished
reading Cory Doctorow's "Makers".

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scott_s
I've put _a lot_ of thought into it, since it's what I do. I never felt
comfortable calling myself a "scientist" because I was doing more inventing
than discovering. I think there are cases where the distinction between the
two can be fuzzy, but I think it comes down to have you learned something
about the universe and the things in it, or have you learned a better way to
build something? Most of the time I've learned a better way to build
something. CS theory people can claim more fundamental knowledge, but they
fall more in the math camp than science.

And make no mistake, I would be _flattered_ to be called a scientist. But I
have friends in physics and biochemistry. I know that there is a fundamental
difference in our research.

However, knowing how to design an experiment that will show what you want to
show is required for both science and engineering research.

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demallien
Grrrr. No, they haven't invented a language - they have invented a vocabulary.
The grammar seems to have been predefined for them.

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india
There is a school of thought[1] that believes, that to a certain extent, this
is true of natural human languages too! Some rules of grammar might just be
hard-wired into the brain and not learnt as we grow up.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar>

~~~
Zaak
From that article: "Since their inception, universal grammar theories have
been subjected to vocal and sustained criticism. In recent years, with the
advent of more sophisticated brands of computational modeling and more
innovative approaches to the study of language acquisition, these criticisms
have multiplied."

It seems likely that there are properties of the human brain and body which
would lead to regularities in human languages. However, I believe that the
proponents of universal grammar are overstating the case.

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brosephius
whenever I hear about robots or software agents "inventing" or "evolving" some
aspect of human intelligence, I'm always skeptical because it sounds like they
were programmed such that this outcome is almost pre-ordained. for example,
evolutionary "art" that "draws" the mona lisa - I saw an example of this, but
the actual mona lisa was essentially the objective function of an
optimization, so why wouldn't it draw it after enough steps? granted this
article doesn't say much about implementation, but it sounds like they were
programmed with the interpretation of words being associated with locations as
a given.

I admit I'm a novice in this particular domain so I can't speak too
intelligently about it, but am I missing something?

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boredguy8
'Approximate that using this limited tool set and tell us when you think
you're close' is a nontrivial problem. Without getting into a discussion of
what creativity 'is', we can probably agree most everything about human
activity begins as imitation.

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trebor
And humans, already having an innate intelligence, can easily imitate
something. Without human interference a robot would rust to pieces before it
ever moved a millimeter (we do have to tell it what to do).

We _could_ invent synthetic creativity, but it in my opinion it'd never
progress past its synthetic nature.

~~~
ugh
Why can’t humans create what nature created? Creativity is not magic, I see no
reason why it should be in principle impossible for humans to build creative
systems.

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CWuestefeld
Let's start with building another human, then, beginning with elemental
chemicals. I think we all know how far we can get with that.

Or, let's try to engineer an entire economy to supplant the emergent system of
markets. Oh, wait, that results in millions of people starving to death.

Some systems are so complex that it's beyond our abilities to dream about how
we might approach such a problem, let alone execute it. Given that we've been
so unsuccessful in assigning a _definition_ to creativity or intelligence, I
think that these things might be in the same category of overly-complex
systems.

~~~
moe
You forgot: Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. Oh wait...

Edit: Not sure why I got downvoted, probably the snarkyness. Fine, I can also
put it the long-winded way:

There used to be a time when flying seemed beyond our abilities to dream about
how we might approach it. Likewise for most other achievements that we have
made.

What's going to stop us from building a human body, including the brain, once
we have the manufacturing technology to do so?

~~~
brosephius
>What's going to stop us from building a human body, including the brain, once
we have the manufacturing technology to do so?

it's that we don't know what "manufacturing technology" we need, because we
don't have a deep enough understanding of how the brain works. I think the
parent's point was that attempts to engineer complex systems fail because
these attempts can't reproduce the emergent behavior that arises from many
layers of interactions from individual agents. a plane is complex, but it's
not a complex system.

edit: I actually disagree a bit with myself - you can make a case that planes
have elements of complex systems, but it's not at the same scale as a brain,
in my opinion.

~~~
moe
Yes, I don't dispute that we can not build a brain today. But I'd say this is
not very different to our inability of building a plane (or understanding how
it could possibly work) back in the 1900s.

I just checked wikipedia and about 100 years ago (February 1911):

    
    
        The first official air mail flight takes place from Allahabad, India to Naini,     
        India, when Henri Pequet carries 6,500 letters a distance of 13 km.
    

Today, 100 years later, I tell you about this event by typing my "letter" into
a portable device that will soon transmit my message over the shy distance of
~8000 miles, in under 100 milliseconds.

So, looking back at what we've achieved in the past 100 years, and unless
someone discovers some inherent property of the human brain that prevents it
from being replicated (did God add DRM?), I remain pretty optimistic that we
will be able to build one soon.

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trebor
This isn't a language: these are just randomized names. Anything can do that,
it just takes the place of numbers, hashes, or whatever database you'd
otherwise use.

Come back when they (re)invent nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Like "beware
that pipe", only "for 'droids".

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amalag
It's like programmers using plaintext for a protocol instead of binary and
getting the front page of Hacker News.

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weirdkid
Cool, except that humans don't always invent words from random syllables. This
is symbology, not language. Words often represent the sound of an action or
are derived from mutating or combining other words for related concepts or
names.

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endergen
Automated Not Invented Here Syndrome (ANIHS)

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lowglow
Have these robots invented words for what's outside of the space they can
sense? That would be interesting.

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ujjvala
Wouldn't it be much better if we seek a robotic natural language or modify
existing natural language to make robotic ?

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digamber_kamat
Looks like finally we can have a real C3PO

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chrislomax
It's good to know that the future Skynet will be able to talk to each other
and we won't have a clue what they are on about!

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chrislomax
Wow, can no one take a joke on here

~~~
Dylan16807
Only if it contributes.

