Posting hiatus

Myself and my family will be moving to Adelaide next week, where I will be taking up a new position as a research fellow in ecological modelling. Since this will involve a fair amount of chaos and interrupted net access, posting to this blog will be quite sporadic over the next few weeks.

Conference paper deadline: VSST 2010

The paper submission deadline for the symposium VSST 2010 (website in French) is May 15, 2010. This symposium includes themes on web intelligence and mining temporal data, topics which are strongly related to computational intelligence. The symposium will be held in Toulouse, France, in October 2010.

AI in Second Life

The IEEE Computer Society is building an AI learning centre on its island in Second Life. It's intended to be a place where AI technologies can be shown off to the public, including the use of intelligent virtual guides (the first of which is based on the famous strategist Sun Tzu, author of the Art of War).

It strikes me as a good idea, and a fairly safe way of testing out technologies in a fairly real-world setting (for various values of "safe" and "real world"). I wonder how much cross-over there will be between this project and the AI in games research community?

Perhaps I will be taking a closer look at Second Life in the future.

Conference paper deadline: IPMU 2010

The deadline for paper submissions to the International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems (IPMU) 2010 is January 17th, 2010. This conference will be held in Dortmund, Germany, 28th June - 2nd July, 2010.

Conference paper deadline: EIS 2010

The deadline for paper submission to the International Symposium on Evolving Intelligent Systems (EIS) 2010 is 15 January 2010. This symposium will be held in Leicester, UK 29th March to 1st April, 2010.

Conference paper deadline: KES AMSTA 2010

The deadline for paper submissions to the 4th International KES Symposium on Agents and Multi-agent Systems – Technologies and Applications is January 15, 2010. This conference will be held in Gdynia, Poland on the 23rd-25th June, 2010.

Turing Test for Game Bots

The Turing Test is very well known not only within the CI community but within the general public. Made really simple, a machine is intelligent if a human carrying out a conversation with that machine can't tell if it is a machine. In other words, we think it is intelligent, therefore it is intelligent.

A similar test has been proposed for game bots. It is described as follows:

"Suppose you are playing an interactive video game with some entity. Could you tell, solely from the conduct of the game, whether the other entity was a human player or a bot? If not, then the bot is deemed to have passed the test."

Playing games requires, in my opinion, more intelligence than having a conversation. It requires comprehension of the gaming environment, at least on some level, as well as anticipation of the actions of the player and the formulation and application of strategy. I have a suspicion that true general purpose AI will come from the gaming world. There's even a dedicated journal for it, the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

The best part of this is that playing games can be part of your job.