A Peek Inside DARPA's Current Projects

dthomas731 writes to tell us that Computerworld has a brief article on some of DARPA's current projects. From the article: "Later in the program, Holland says, PAL will be able to 'automatically watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon.' At that point, perhaps DARPA's PAL could be renamed HAL, for Hearing Assistant That Learns. The original HAL, in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, tells the astronauts how it knows they're plotting to disconnect it: 'Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.'"

The Real Issue

The Real issue is some idiot programming a computer to defend against someone just trying to turn it off.A computer should be programmed to know it can make mistakes.

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[HAL] The only mistakes a computer makes is due to human error [/HAL]

I don't think computers are capable of making mistakes, because they are incapapble of thinking, they can process and store but this does not entail thought. Define for me thought.
Tho

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What does conscious thought have to do with mistakes? Mistakes are when you have some kind of expectation and those expectations fail to be met. If I buy some accounting software, and the figures don't add up correctly, then the software has made a mistake

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/. is probably the reason I DON'T get anything done during the day =). I was somewhat responding to "teaching computers that they make mistakes." But if you were going to do that, they would have to evaluate whether what they do is make mistakes or not,

Re:The Real Issue

Conscious thought has everything to do with mistakes.

A machine is mechanical and is incapable of mistakes as it can't set expectations.

From your quote, "Mistakes are when you have some kind of expectation and those expectations fail to be met.", machines aren't capable of setting expectations, only following a basic 'to do' list.

If a machine adds 1+1 and returns 3 to the register, then it didn't fail, it added 1+1 in the way it knows how to.

AI today is nothing more than a bunch of IF..THEN possiblities run on fast processors to make it seem instantaneous and 'alive'.

You can program a machine to be aware of it's power (Voltage) and you can have a program set to monitor that power with cameras and laser beams and whatever else with commands to shoot laser beams at any device that comes near that power but the machine still isn't aware of what power is.

Not to get philosophical here but IMO, AI won't ever be real until a machine has a belief system and part of that belief system relies upon it's own ability to get energy, just like animals do.

It's possible that a program can be written so that a machine is aware of it's own requirements but then we're back to a bunch of IF..THEN statements written by programmers.

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Prove that you or I are conscious and more than just an incredibly complicated series of IF..THEN statements. :)

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You can program a machine to be aware of it's power (Voltage) and you can have a program set to monitor that power with cameras and laser beams and whatever else with commands to shoot laser beams at any device that comes near that power but the machine s

Re:The Real Issue

I don't think computers are capable of making mistakes, because they are incapapble of thinking, they can process and store but this does not entail thought.

Then they can't make mistakes, but can make errors. What do you call it when a brownout causes a computer to flip a bit and give an incorrect answer to a math problem? How about when it is programmed incorrectly so that it gives 2+2=5? How about when a user intends to add 2 and 3, but types in 2+2? In all cases, the computer outputs a wrong answer. Computers can be wrong and are wrong all the time. The wrong answers are errors. A "mistake" isn't an assigning of blame. I agree that computers can be blameless, but that does not mean that mistakes involving computers can't be made. I think your definition of "mistake" is not the most common, and would be the point of contention in this discussion, not whether computers have ever outputted an erroneous answer.

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Computers shouldn't be programmed to know they can make mistakes. They should observe themselves making mistakes and learn that they can. Sheesh. Next you'll be suggesting that children should be programmed from birth to believe whatever it's convenient fo

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then who knows what they may learn

If we already knew what an intelligent computer could learn, then there wouldn't be much point in making one, would there?

Knowledge

The only programming that leads to context-rich understanding that could be called "knowledge" in the human sense is self-programming. Like babies. We're all born with a some basic software and a lot of hardware, but it's interaction over time with our e

Paranoid

Except that HAL was paranoid. That the astronauts had a conversation they tried to hide from HAL was more than enough. The actual content of the conversation was immaterial.

Re:Paranoid

Actually, it was over long before that. HAL was just following it's programming, perfectly.

HAL was programmed to eliminate any possibile failure points in the mission that he could. Through the spaceflight, HAL observed that the humans in the mission were failable (one of them made a suboptimal chess move, a handful of other mistakes were made). HAL had the ability to complete the mission on it's own. Therefore, HAL made the decision, in line with it's programming, to eliminate the human element.

It makes sense, really, when you think about it. And truly, if Dave had just gone along with it and died, HAL would have finished the job perfectly fine.

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It was some years ago, but I think that the book also stresses the problem for HAL in that the full mission was never revealed to the human crew, which meant that even too good thinking on their part, at the wrong point in time, would be considered a failu

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I always wondered....was the HAL being only one letter off each from IBM just a coincidence, or was that written on purpose that way?

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Even if it wasn't a coincidence... The movie used "rebranded" IBM equipment.

The same was said about Windows NT. WNT->VMS

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Clarke claims it's a coincidence. He mentions it in "Lost Worlds of 2001", and specifically has Chandra debunk it in "2010".

As I interpreted the scene...

Except that HAL was paranoid. That the astronauts had a conversation they tried to hide from HAL was more than enough. The actual content of the conversation was immaterial.

As I interpreted the scene: Though the audio pickups were off, HAL had a clear vi

REAL sneak peak

Here's a LOT of stuff to look through....don't tell anyone ;-)

Top Secret Stuff at DARPA [darpa.mil]. [DARPA]

Not "Strong" AI

The DoD funds a huge percentage of AI research, but at the end of the day they're interested in things that can be easily weaponized or used for simple intelligence sifting heuristics. The most fundamentally interesting research in AI is in the humanoid robotics projects such as those at the MIT shop, and it is from these more humanly-modeled projects that anything like HAL could ever issue. Search-digest heuristics like PAL aren't much like humans and will never lead to anything approching a human's contextually rich understanding of the world at large any more than really advanced racecar design will lead to interstellar craft.

The difference, as Searle would say, between Strong (humanlike) AI and Weak (software widget like) AI is a difference of type, not scale.

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The most fundamentally interesting research in AI is in the humanoid robotics projects such as those at the MIT shop, and it is from these more humanly-modeled projects that anything like HAL could ever issue. Search-digest heuristics like PAL aren't much like humans and will never lead to anything approching a human's contextually rich understanding of the world at large

It is far from clear whether "humanoid robotics" are either necessary or useful in producing AI with a "contextually rich understanding of the world at large".

Clarification

I don't mean to imply humanoid robotics qua robotics is necessary to AI development. Rather, only in a creature that acts as an agent inhabiting the world at large can one expect anything like human-level understanding thereof to develop. It's all very w

Agreed

I didn't mean to imply that only Strong AI is militarily useful. In fact, I would say that Strong AI is *not* useful, if one thinks about the ethics of forcing anything sentient to go to war in one's place.

Also, I have no trouble recognizing that cleverly

DARPA Slogans

DARPA: We don't make the things that kill people. We make the things that kill people better. DARPA: We bring good things to life... that are then used to kill people. DARPA: Who do you want to kill today?

DARPA Created The Internet

Well, it provided the funding, anyway.

Come on you Tin-foil Hat wearers...

"watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon."
Anyone care to guess what they plan to use that little gadget for?

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Making sure your waitress gets your order right, of course.

I mean really...Bush only invaded Iraq because that waitress brought him FRENCH dressing instead of RANCH like he asked...

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If that were true, the war would have been won when they renamed it Freedom dressing.

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Recording 3 hours of PHB meetings and figuring out that all they agreed upon was the time for the next meeting to set the itenary for the real meeting.

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"watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon."
Anyone care to guess what they plan to use that little gadget for?

Voyeur radio porn?

I'm Scared dave

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singula rity [wikipedia.org]

I worked will on a DARPA...

DARPA has yet to acknowledge the project that I was working on 3 years from now in 2010. Last week, January 14, 2012 we will successfully tested the Time Redaction Project. So, I gave myself the plans tomorrow so that I will be submitting them a few years ago to get the grant money. DOD has used this to send a nuke to kill the dinosaurs. I hope it works.

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Not anymore, your mom was just assassinated before your birth by an android you failed to prevent the invention of.

Re:I worked will on a DARPA...

So, I wiollen have given myself the plans tomorrow so that I wiollen be submitting them a few years ago to get the grant money.

There, fixed that for you.

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You should be ashamed. It is [halfbakery.com]:
DARPA has yet to acknowledge the project that I worked will on 3 years from now in 2010. Last week, January 14, 2012 we tested will successfully the Time Redaction Project. So, I gave myself the plans tomorrow so that I submit

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Sorry, but the shame, good sir, lies with you. Douglas Adams is the foremost authority on time travel verb usage, not some two-bit blogger.

From the link you provided

P.S. I am aware of Douglas Adams' ideas, which went something like 'I will wiollen the b

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I love DNA as much as the next guy. But I doubt Adams would want his writing to be taken so seriously. You remind me of a friend of mine who still carries a towel with him everywhere. As for the grammar bit, Google thinks [google.com] otherwise.

Not what HAL stood for

[P]erhaps DARPA's PAL could be renamed HAL, for Hearing Assistant That Learns.

Perhaps, but that's not what the orignal HAL stood for. HAL was short for Hueristic ALgorithmal. Arthur C. Clark had to put that into one of his books in the series (2010 I

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No, but the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is obviously involved, since a robot is "your plastic PAL who's fun to be with."

Finally!

...is to improve application productivity by a factor of 10 through new programming languages and development tools.

Cool. The government is finally ditching COBOL and FORTRAN.

GITS 2

We weep for a bird's cry, but not for a fish's blood. Blessed are those with a voice. If the dolls also had voices, they would have screamed, "I didn't want to become human."

vaporware and PR

IAA graduate student in computational linguistics.

Later in the program, Holland says, PAL will be able to "automatically watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon."

PAL's role here is not clear. The 'easier' task would be to monitor the body language of the two conversers and, by lining up a list of tasks with the observation of their head movements, correctly predict which points in the conversation were the ones where someone performed an "agreement" gesture.

The much, much more difficult task would be to actually read lips. There are only certain properties of phonemes you can deduce from how the lips and jaw move; many, many other features of speech are lost. Only when you supply the machine with a limited set of words in a limited topic domain do you get good performance; otherwise, you're grasping at straws. And then taking out most of the speech signal? Please.

But no, DARPA is cool and will save all the translators in Iraq (by 2009, well before the war ends.) PR and vaporware win the day!

Allow me to be skeptical

> Later in the program, Holland says, PAL will be able to "automatically watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon."

Sure. You will first have to s

Say What?

***"watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon."***

I don't know about anyone else, but my experience has been that very few conversations actually result in mutual agreem

2007 DoD proposal list

a more complete list for research proposals is here: https://www.dodsbir.net/solicitation/sttr07/defaul t.htm [dodsbir.net]

the real research behind this

WRT to "watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon":

Here's a link to the actual research that they are likely talking about:

http://godel.stanford.edu/~niekrasz/papers/PurverE hlenEtAl06_Shallow.pdf [stanford.edu]

As you might expect, the ComputerWorld article's summary of the technology is rather optimistic. Nonetheless, this stuff really does exist, and shows some promise in both military and general applications.

Same sex conversations only...

using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon.

This would only work for conversations between people of the same sex. There has never been a conversation between a man and a woman in which both participants would agree on the tasks...

M: Want to continue this conversation at my place?
F: Take a leap!
Computer: Agreed to move conversation to male's residence by leaping.

F: When are you going to mow the lawn?
M: Yeah, I'll get right on that.
Computer: Male agreed to mow lawn at earliest opportunity

Look Closer; Go Cross-Eyed

I figured I'd check out the source behind the source and visit the DARPA [darpa.mil] web site. I got curious and decided to check out their latest budget estimate [darpa.mil]. What a peach! The "overview" looks like mainframe printout, which of course spills onto a second page

HAL

"Dave, put that Windows CD down. Dave... DAVE!"

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That, or perhaps folks capable of acting out very bad kung fu movie dubs.

Suddenly, Michael Winslow [imdb.com] becomes in-demand again.