He was your boet in a film shot entirely as an FPS game, and now Sharlto Copley is teaming up with Neill Blomkamp for yet another sci-fi adventure. In Chappie, Copley voices a robot who has been gifted the ability to think and feel for himself. The coming-of-age story has our protagonist going from watching cartoons and looking cool to experiencing first-hand how the world rejects things that it doesn’t understand. Check out the trailer below.
Chappie was shot in Johannesburg and you would have undoubtedly recognized oddballs Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er playing a parental role. Dev Patel is the young creator and mullet-ed Hugh Jackman finds A.I. too unpredictable. Chappie is set for release in March 2015.
The game Rock-Paper-Scissors (or RPS) is thought to have been created at the time of the Chinese Han dynasty. It was called shoushiling, roughly translated to “hand-command”. Its popularity has spread all over the world so much so there is even a world society dedicated to the sport and several officially sanctioned events.
Computers want in on the action too, and in this handy flash game from The New York Times, you can test how you would fare against a computer that is programmed to uses databanks of statistical info to mimic human thinking and to exploit the fact that people tend to stick to patterns.
Play RPS against the computer at The New York Times website and let us know how you did.
You may recall an earlier post on Watson (refresh your memory), IBM’s artificial intelligence system that is part of their DeepQA, a research project that aims to understand and answer questions that are asked in everyday natural language.
During a warm-up match shot in early January 2011, Watson competed against two of the all-time greats of the popular American quiz show, “Jeopardy!” Watson was pitted against Ken Jennings, who has won over USD 3,000,000 and Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money earner on the show. At the end of the round, Watson came out the clear winner. Now the time for the IBM Challenge has come, and during the period from February 14th to the 16th Watson will officially face the two champions in two matches. The winner of the matches will pocket the USD 1,000,000 prize. Here is day one of the IBM Challenge where the show introduces Watson and takes a look at its innards and history before proceeding to the contest.
Word around the server room is that a super computer has beaten two supremely champions in a test match of Jeopardy. It was in preparation for the human vs. computer contest that is due to be recorded in the coming days. Initially I wasn’t surprised the machine won, it’s a supercomputer; it can search through its massive banks of data and produce the correct answer before its human opponent can say “Um…” But it turns to be somewhat more complex and grand undertaking than I could have ever imagined.
Watson is the name of this all-conquering overlord artificial intelligence system created by IBM. It is named after the founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson who in 1948 said, “I think there’s a world market for about 5 computers.” I bet his mind would have exploded if he were to see the extent to which computers are ingrained in our lives today. In 2007 IBM Research began creating Watson as part of DeepQA, a research project that aims to understand and answer questions that are posed in spoken sentences that we use every day, natural language as it’s called. This little clip from IBM explains how Watson came into being.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1c7s7-3fXI&NR
And here is the warm-up match where Watson competed against contestants Ken Jennings who has earned over USD 3 million on the game show, and Brad Rutter who is biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy.
If Watson had emotions (we are informed he does not), I’d just imagine a huge shit-eating grin would be plastered all over its LCD screen. The human vs. computer Jeopardy episode will be aired in mid February. If you’re a betting person, who would you put your money on?
