Google chats and A.I.

Recently I've been listening to some lectures on the Google Tech Talks channel on YouTube. One is by Ashwin Ram, Associate Professor and Director of the Cognitive Computing Lab in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He talks about how games might use various kinds (or levels) of artificial intelligence to achieve realistic interaction. As computers become more powerful, some of these advanced methods can be realistically implemented. Prof. Ram -- talk about a name that matches his career! -- gives some statistics on who plays games at the beginning of his talk, and then transitions into a survey of the broader techniques of A.I.. The questions at the end by the various attendees at Google were also quite interesting.

Another deep topic of A.I. comes from what's called Artificial Life, an area where I especially have research interests. Though the topic is just as engaging, Unlike the smooth Dr. Ram, this presenter comes off as having endured multiple attack wedgies from everyone in his High School's athletic program (including the coaches.) Nonetheless, his research and results are unquestionably competent. He's Virgil Griffith, a graduate student in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology, and one-time target of a sedition and espionage suet.

O.

REFERENCES

[image] The Bleeding Purple Podcast Blog

[ * ] Ashwin Ram "Case Based Reasoning for Game AI" Google Tech Talks April, 3 2008 (Accessed June 8, 2009)

[ * ] Virgil Griffit "Polyworld: Using Evolution to Design Artificial Intelligence" Google Tech Talks November, 8 2007 (Accessed June 6, 2009)