AI Meets Grids

There's nothing like the terms "AI" and "natural language" to put a smile on a researcher's face--and a shiver down an accountant's spine. Still, it's going to happen, commercialization or not.

For instance, in the most recent instance, five European research institutes are collaborating on the "New Ties" project to create a emerging world populated by randomly generated software beings, capable of developing their own language and culture--and that interact socially.

"While individual (or machine) learning and evolutionary behavior have been quite well studied, social learning is still an unknown quantity," says project coordinator Gusz Eiben, an AI professor at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Joining Vrije are the University of Surrey, Budapest’s Eotvos Lorand University, Edinburgh’s Napier University, and Tilburg University in The Netherlands. The goal of the multidisciplinary team is to study natural processes (like language development), and advance the construction of collective artificial intelligence.

The New Ties project will be running across a grid of 60 computers, although plans call for scaling up to 5000 computers. "No one has ever created an engine of this complexity," says Eiben, adding that it will support about 1000 agents at first, building up to millions--each one a unique entity with its own characteristics, including gender, life expectancy, fertility, size, and metabolism. The agents will not be labelled, but will have their own distinguishing characteristics to make them recognisable. Their traits will be inherited from their parents, and passed on to their offspring, but they will be able to learn from their own experiences and from each other.

The agents will be able to communicate using a few simple words--food, near, and agent. "One interesting question is how they will communicate," says Eiben. "Naturally, the linguists want to see how they develop a spoken language, but for the AI researchers we will also test to see if there are possible alternatives--telepathy, for example." Some basic rules will also be given, along the lines of, "if it’s hot, it burns," but agents are expected to add to the rule set as they discover new laws of nature.

For more information on building grid computers, see "Building Grid-Enabled Data-Mining Applications" by Alex Depoutovitch and Alex Wainstein, "The Media Grid" by Aaron E. Walsh, and "Grid Computing and the Linda Programming Model" by Rob Bjornson and Andrew Sherman.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:56 AM  Permalink