Researcher builds machines that daydream

Perth computer scientist Graham Mann was developing algorithms to simulate “free thinking” and emotion.Speaking at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane this week, the Murdoch University professor described efforts to translate the “feel” of Aesop’s Fables for machines.Today’s machines outperformed humans on “high focus”, rational tasks like diagnosing breast cancer from data.But they lacked “lower focus” capabilities that identified superficial resemblances and salience, Mann explained.”It’s long been thought that emotions and reason are in conflict with each other,” he said. “You think of Mr Spock, or scientists as very cold people who are objective and so on.”I’ve reached the conclusion that an intelligent system must have emotions built into it before it can function and so on.”I believe that it is possible – if we start to model the way human beings reason about things – to achieve much more flexible processing of storylines, plans, even understanding how human beings behave.”Mann developed a conceptual parser that identified the “feel” of Aesop’s Fables, which were deemed “simple and short enough to represent as conceptual graph data structures”.His algorithm was based on Plutchick’s Wheel of Emotions, which illustrated emotions as a colour wheel and disallowed mutually exclusive states – like joy and sadness – from being experienced simultaneously.The machine freely associated three stories: The Thirsty Pigeon; The Cat and the Cock; and The Wolf and the Crane.When queried on the association, the machine responded: “I felt sad for the bird.”

Via: Itnews

The video is bad quality but worth listening…

Researcher builds machines that daydream , posted with vodpod