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Artificial Intelligence is the researchers' long-lasting dream to make computers/machines to act like human beings. Robots are the direct and explicit "product" to implement human's dream. Scientists make robots "playing" in the real life to replace persons' work. For example, robots can be used to find the victims in the collapsed buildings after earthquakes, or find the victims down inside the mines after collapse, or search for the livings after terrorists' attack. Robots become more and more intelligent. However, the tough job for the AI scientist is still to writing the software/programming to make smart robots. RoboCup US Open is an important annual event for the development field of robots. The example of this year event is that computer-programmed Sony Aibos look for the ball using cameras on their noses, communicate with each other over a wireless network and attempt to score goals, with the exception of the specially-programmed goalkeeping dog.
Magically, American researchers devised a small robot which can cope itself with the spare parts recently. This is the ever big step to prove that the ability to reproduce is not unique to biology. Their long-term plan is to design robots made from hundreds or thousands of identical basic modules. This report gave out a detailed story. Combining this with the biology of self-repair and of replication would make huge changes to the field of robotics. More important, I think, is that scientists have decreased the distance between robots and human to some extent. I.Rotot probably becomes really true in our future life. What will happen then?
In my previous blog "Can Machine Understand What You mean?", Qualrus was introduced to be used to grade student's assignments, in particular essay. I could not agree this brave experiment. The reason is to my current knowledge computers don't hold the abilities to give out a judgement for the rightness or wrong. As for the personal subjective ideas in the essay, it is impossbible to be graded by machines.
Similiar news about Brent's software makes me believe with no doubt that computers could not replace humans/teachers to do essay grading work. It is a big challenge, but will not succeed under the currrent circumstances due to the machine's lack of re-birthing and evolveing of new concepts from old concepts, and connecting between relevant relationships to compose reasoning process naturally (to my sense). The huge backend behind this grading software must be a huge knowledge base, or simply a huge database, which provides information sources (example sentences, already-scored papers) for the comparison work between students' essays submitted to the system and sample essays in the backend source then give out a score finally based on those similiar-quality examples. There are different ways to express the same idear! How we could guarantee the consistency and integrality of the sources will be unresolvable with our current technologies!
To the end, computers are still machines! They are operated by the human beings. Actually the origins of this kind of software/systems, I think, are coming from the people's desires to seek the equity. They do not hope that "different teachers grade different papers differently". I really don't want to know that the real answers for this kind of software is to free human beings from responsibilities. That will make us learn much faster how to cheat computers than human beings. It is the tragedy of advanced technologies!
