Is nothing sacred? Are we really on the cusp of being pushed off our perch at the top of the food chain by robotic devices that we ourselves have created?
First Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov.
Then last weekend, during the Man-Machine Poker Competition in Las Vegas, a computer dubbed Polaris 2.0 that was designed by the University of Alberta defeated a team of expert poker players. Polaris 2.0 went head-to-head in four rounds of 500 hands against two human opponents, winning two rounds, losing one, and drawing one.
A report on EE Times said Polaris learned from experience.
Now, check this out from another EE Times article:
An upgraded robot designed by General Electric Fanuc (GEF) and programmed by Nuvation Research Corp. (San Jose, Calif.) can beat most human air hockey players, its developers claim.
The robot is powered by a special pc-board that can instantly switch between Freescale Semiconductor's 8-bit Flexis and its 32-bit ColdFire microcontrollers running identical C language programs. The 8-bit version lost to most human players, but the 32-bit microcontroller defeated even the best human air hockey players by a ratio of three to one.
And now the scary part:
So far, the robot has defeated every human opponent running in 32-bit mode, averaging three times as many goals as human players. The algorithm's success resulted from revising its strategy whenever a goal was scored against it. Some revisions were refinements of strategies, but others were outright fixes to bugs in tactics.
Not only are they beating us, they're changing tactics midstream when they're being scored upon?
What is Spock doing these days? Can he avenge Kasparov? Will he come out of retirement? And more importantly does he play air hockey?
Or maybe we simply need to change the field of battle?
Circle gets the square...
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