“The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a story on Peekaboom,
a two-player on-line game in which one player tries to get the other player to guess a word associated with an image, by revealing parts of the image one click at a time. From the article, ‘The process of revealing objects, or highlighting images within the larger context of the photo, is the sort of thing that researchers in computer vision must do to teach computers to see.’”

Slashdot | Teaching Computers to See with Games

We knew it would eventually happen, someone at Realdoll called the guys at robo-lab!! Heck! In a few years I’ll buy a couple myself!

“An android could get away with it for a short time, 5-10 seconds. However, if we carefully select the situation, we could extend that, to perhaps 10 minutes,” - Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, Osaka University, Japan.

jolyon writes “The BBC is reporting that Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised - a “female” android called Repliee Q1. ‘She’ has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, can flutter her eyelids, move her hands like a human and even appears to breathe. She can only sit though at present, so we’re a long way from Blade Runner yet.”

* Slashdot | Japanese Develop ‘Female’ Android

museumpeace writes “News.com has posted its second story in a week on a hopeful Grand Challenge contender. Standford’s Stanley, a VW Taureg run by 100000 lines of code can hit 40 mph and has now traversed all but 3 miles of last year’s desert course without problems. A few days earlier, CMU’s Team Red announced that its Sandstorm, a modified Hummer, had run 200 miles without any problems though on a closed track. DARPA cut the field to 40 in June and will cut it to 20 before the race in October.”

* Slashdot | DARPA Grand Challenge A Real Race At Last?

See previous post:
* Stanford and Volkswagen Create Autonomous Vehicle

The Day That Changed Everything

Whoa!! My very own droid!!
My happy droids and I wishes all the teams at RoboCup 2005 the best of luck.
* RoboCup 2005 Osaka, Japan

prostoalex writes “The Ray Kurzweil Reader is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world. These essays, all published on KurzweilAI.net from 2001 to 2003, are now available as a PDF document for convenient downloading and offline reading. The 30 essays, organized in seven memes (such as ‘How to Build a Brain’), cover subjects ranging from a review of Matrix Reloaded to ‘The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine’ and ‘Human Body Version 2.0.’”

* Slashdot | Ray Kurzweil 2001-2003 essays Available as a PDF