

Robots Invent Their Own Language  - cwan
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/16-robots-invent-their-own-language

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ColinWright
For those who are interested, they might like to look at the discussion from
when this same story was submitted four months ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556198>

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16BitTons
I'm a bit confused. Did they invent their own language, or did they randomly
assign names to places on a map?

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smallblacksun
They randomly assigned names to places on a map (and then reconciled the names
with each other so all the robots were using the same names). Which is
impressive, but nothing like what the article claims.

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guimarin
This is a very cool concept. I think it would be more realistic for the robots
to communicate via some rf technology, as opposed to sound though.
Communicating in sound requires a whole apparatus that is neither as efficient
or fast as many others. Still a very neat approach.

~~~
jonnathanson
There is a legitimate benefit to developing sound recognition capabilities in
machines. Sound is a very real part of the world around us. Most lifeforms
capable of communication do so through sound. The sense of sound is a very
important way of interacting with the environment. For these reasons, among
others, robots will probably need sound-processing capabilities to
successfully and fully navigate the world around them.

As for whether they need sound-based languages, that's a good question.
Presumably the folks developing AI would like to keep that AI at least
somewhat anthropomorphized, so that _we_ will always have a sense for what the
robots are doing. It's much easier to interact with, and teach, a robot when
we're capable of communicating with it on a common ground.

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Flow
"THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM..."? :-D

(Great movie, watch it: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/> )

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toblender
The robot overlords have spoken. Kill all humans.

