Physics of the Impossible: Robots

     It is possible that I’m already tired of you with my articles on physical subjects. However, let me once again disturb you with an offtopic and talk about Robots. I hope you learn a lot of new and interesting things. And if you like this article, then, most likely, you will also like these: Teleportation , Invisibility . I prepared the article within a week, so there should be no errors. But if you find something wrong in the text, please let us know. Well, we will continue to develop physically.

(Almost all the information in this article is taken from the book by Michio Kaku, “Physics of the Impossible . ” Thanks to him, not to me.)

As always, we start with a quote:

Once, in less than 30 years, we quietly cease to be the smartest on Earth © James Makalir

The history of the development of artificial intelligence

    The robot . Most likely in our civilized world there is no longer a single person who would never hear this word. However, few people know that in fact the word "robot" was coined in 1920 by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek . In Czech, it means "hard tedious work," and in Slovak it simply means "work."
    The idea of ​​a mechanical being has long captured the imagination of many. The lumberjack from the Magic Land, the robotic children from Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence, the killer robots from Terminator are machines that can think and act like humans.
    In the 1st century Geron of Alexandria (he was credited with inventing a steam engine) made machine guns, and one of them, according to legend, was able to talk. Nine hundred years agoAl-Jazari invented and designed such automatic devices as a water clock, all kinds of kitchen appliances and musical instruments driven by the power of water. In 1495, the great Italian artist and Renaissance scientist Leonardo da Vinci drew a diagram of a mechanical knight who could sit, move his arms, head and open, close his jaw. Historians consider this scheme the first realistic design of a humanoid machine. And in 1927, robots became the heroes of one of the first and most expensive silent films of all time - the film Metropolis, filmed in Germany by director Fritz Lang.
    But who is currently the most influential person in the field of AI? This person is Alan Turing. This is probably not the first time you hear this name, since all digital computers obey its laws. A little deviate from the topic:

In 1931 Viennese mathematician Kurt Gödel made a real sensation in mathematics when he proved that in arithmetic there are true statements that cannot be proved by means of arithmetic alone. For example: Goldbach’s hypothesis that any even integer greater than two can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. This hypothesis has not been proven so far. Gödel's proof in the dust broke the dream of all mathematicians from the era of the ancient Greeks: to prove all true statements in mathematics. It turned out that mathematics was an unfinished and imperfectly constructed building and that it was unlikely that it would be possible to complete the construction. Turing also participated in this revolution, showing that if a machine needs infinite time for any kind of computation, then this cannot be calculated.

Tests for robots

The question of whether it is possible to create an AI smarter than human still remains open. Here are a few well-known tests for robots, which they will be able to compare with us intellectually.

• Turing test . Tired of the barren and endless philosophical debate about whether the machine can “think” and whether it has a “soul”, he tried to bring clarity and accuracy to the discussion about AI and came up with a specific test. He suggested placing the car and the person in separate isolated and sealed rooms, and then asking both questions. If you find yourself unable to distinguish between the answers of the car from the person, we can assume that the car passed the Turing test.
• Chinese room test . The philosopher from the University of California at Berkeley, John Searle, proposed to prove the impossibility of creating a machine that would be able to think as a person, the following test: robots must understand not only the syntax of the language (for example, Chinese), but also its semantics. That is, they must not only blindly manipulate the symbols of the language, but also understand the meaning embedded in them.

Top-Down Approach

    Attempts by scientists around the world to create robots have met with at least two serious problems that do not allow noticeable progress in this direction: pattern recognition and common sense. Robots see much better than us, but do not understand what they saw. Robots hear much better than us, but do not understand what they hear. To solve this problem, researchers tried to apply a top-down approach. The goal of the scientists was to program all the rules and laws of pattern recognition and common sense and burn these programs onto a single CD-ROM. They believe that any computer in which you insert this disk instantly recognizes itself and becomes intelligent, no worse than a person.
    In the 1950s and 1960s, enormous successes were achieved in this direction. There are robots that can play checkers, solve algebraic problems, raise bricks from the floor, etc. In 1969 The Sheiki robot made a real sensation. This wheeled trolley with a camera at the top and a PDP computer could move in space, analyzing objects around.
    However, shortcomings of this approach soon appeared. There were bulky awkward robots that were able to navigate in a room in which there are objects with only right angles. It's funny, but the fruit fly, whose brain contains only 250,000 neurons and which, by computational power, is not suitable for any robot, can easily navigate and move in three dimensions.
    Thanks to this approach, scientists began to realize that playing chess or multiplying huge numbers involves only a tiny fraction of the human mind. Victory in 1997 IBM’s Deep Blue computer over World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov has proven that you don’t even have to think to win chess. This does not mean that Kasparov is not able to think deeply; it only means that when playing chess you can do without deep thoughts.
    In general, attempts to program all the laws of common sense and drive them into one computer failed because common sense has too many laws. A person masters them effortlessly - after all, from birth he constantly encounters reality, gradually absorbing the laws of physics and biology. With robots, everything is different.

Bottom Up Approach

    The essence of this approach is that, imitating evolution, make the robot learn from experience how a baby learns. After all, insects, say, are guided when moving not by scanning the image of the world around them, breaking it into trillions of pixels and processing the resulting image. No, the insect’s brain consists of “neural networks” - self-learning machines that slowly, bumping into obstacles, master the art of moving correctly in a hostile world. It is known that at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) with great difficulty they created a robot that moves around the room with a top-down approach, but when using the bottom-up approach, robots are able to rush around the room in a few minutes.
    One of Rodney Brooks’s new projects (Director of AI MIT Lab) was COG, an attempt to create a mechanical robot with the mind of a six-month-old baby. Externally, the robot is a mishmash of wires, electrical circuits and drives, but is equipped with a head, eyes and hands (images are nearby). There is no program in it that defines any laws of the mind. Instead, the robot was taught to focus its eyes and follow a human trainer who is trying to teach the robot simple skills.

Detailed example of this approach

Conclusion

    Some scientists believe that someday these two approaches will merge together and such a merger can be the key to creating real artificial intelligence and humanoid robots. In the end, when a child learns, he uses both methods.
    Will Computers Surpass Us in Reasonability? Of course, in principle, this is not prohibited by any laws of nature. If robots are self-learning neural networks and if they have reached a level of development that allows them to learn faster and more efficiently than we learn, then it is logical to assume that over time they will surpass us in reasoning. In the distant future, robots or humanoid cyborgs may even give us immortality. Marvin Minskyadds: “What if the sun goes out or we destroy the planet ourselves? Why not make physicists, engineers, or mathematicians better than ourselves? Perhaps we need to be architects of our future. If not, our culture may disappear. ” Although not all fundamental laws of AI are still open, progress in this area is leaps and bounds, so already at the end of this century, something similar to the terminator can be expected :)

Question. Well, in order for us to have something to discuss, let me ask you this question: If you had a robot that is capable of quite worthily doing any kind of work, what would you ask to do or ask to do it in the first place?For example, I hate making breakfast. Lunch, dinner is easy, but not breakfast! Therefore, I would ask him to make me some morning dish every day.