Project Joshua Blue

Joshua Blue is a project under development by IBM that focuses on advancing the artificial intelligence field by designing and programing computers to emulate human mental functions.

Goals

According to researchers at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the main goal of Joshua Blue is "to achieve cognitive flexibility that approaches human functioning".[1] In short, IBM is aiming to design Joshua Blue to 'think like a human',[2] mainly in terms of emotional thought; similar IBM projects focusing on logical thought and strategic reasoning include Deep Blue, a logic-based chess playing computer, and Watson, a question-driven artificial intelligence software program. Currently, the vast majority of computers and computational systems run off of an input-output model; some sort of input is entered in and some output is given back. Through Project Joshua Blue, IBM hopes to develop computers to the point where they are asking questions and searching for answers themselves rather than relying on an external input to run or only crunching numbers to give a pre-programmed response once given a task. If they succeed in this task, the artificial intelligence knowledge gained from Project Joshua Blue could potentially be used to create social robots that work and act very much like humans do. These robots could take over tasks too dangerous for humans to engage in even if such tasks required many different decisions to be made along the way; the technology advancement gained through Joshua Blue's potential success would allow for the robots to think for themselves and work their way through problems just as humans do.

How it will work

Although Project Joshua Blue is still in its planning stages, a model of Joshua Blue's learning pattern has been created. Similar to how young children learn human traits through interacting with their surroundings, Joshua Blue will acquire knowledge through external stimuli present in its environment.[1][3] IBM believes that if computers evolve to learn in this way and then comprehend and analyze the knowledge gained using reason, computers could begin to possess a "mind", of sorts, capable of demonstrating complex social behaviors similar to those of humans.

Most likely done as a precaution to avoid theft of their ideas, IBM has not released any significant information regarding how Joshua Blue will physically gather information. Thus far, IBM has revealed that Joshua Blue will be a computer with a network of wires and input nodes that function as a computer nervous system. This nervous system will be used by Joshua Blue to perceive affect, or personal emotional feeling. Not only will this network of input nodes help Joshua Blue discover things physically, it will also allow Joshua Blue to interpret the significance of events. The input nodes, or proprioceptors, will enable Joshua Blue to be aware of things that happen around itself, as well as recognize and attach meaning to the emotional effect produced by interacting with an object in a certain way.[1] In addition, Joshua Blue's proprioceptors will function as pain and pleasure sensors, allowing Joshua Blue to employ a similar "reward and punishment" system that humans use to form behaviors. This will eventually lead Joshua Blue to expect certain outcomes from acting, reacting, or interacting in certain ways, eventually leading to the development of behavioral patterns which IBM hopes to study in order to further bridge the gap between human mental functions and computer functions.

Related projects

Through three of their projects (Deep Blue, Watson, and Joshua Blue), IBM is attempting to create computers that imitate the common functions of the human brain. The first of the three, Deep Blue, is a purely logic-driven chess-playing computer. Its ability to process 200 million chess moves per second allowed it to win a six-game match against world-champion chess player Garry Kasparov in May 1997.[4] In logical situations that require finding an answer as fast as possible, Deep Blue's technology excels as long as the method of solving the problem at hand has already been done before; Deep Blue's software only needs to rearrange the string of steps it takes to get to the end of the problem.

Watson, designed between the completion of Deep Blue and the development of Joshua Blue, is a Jeopardy!-playing computer that, like Deep Blue, was capable of beating the best in the business of its game. Named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson,[5] Watson features 15 terabytes of Random Access Memory (RAM).[6] This enormous amount of processing power allows Watson to sift through massive amounts of stored data every second. Numerous encyclopedias, film scripts, and other types of written texts have been downloaded into Watson's internal memory in order to give Watson the large basis of information it needs in order to come up with its answer to the Jeopardy! question asked. Because Watson is a computer and, thus, never forgets information it learns, its challenge is not recalling information when it is asked a question, but rather analyzing that information and determining an acceptable answer to the question. Human language has many nuances that normal computers cannot distinguish intended meaning from. A simplified example; if while typing out a letter you write "Fleas comb to the meat root at 10 o'clock" rather than "Please come to the meeting room at 10 o'clock", a computer's autocorrect feature cannot recognize the error in the first sentence because, to a computer, nothing is wrong; the words are all spelled correctly and spaced equally with one space. Although the first sentence makes no sense in the English language, a computer overlooks this because it has no way to consider the actual meaning of a phrase instead of only looking at the spelling of the words in the phrase. Watson has been programmed to take human language guidelines into consideration when it answers questions. This helps Watson twofold; one, it allows Watson to determine what specifically is being asked, and two, it allows Watson to come up with an answer that makes logical sense (i.e. answering "orange" to a question asking for the name of America's first president would not make sense, while answering "George Washington" would). Watson's abilities shine most when put to use solving issues with characteristics that have already been determined. By filtering through the characteristics of various instances of a problem, Watson can rule out what the problem is "not", and consequently determine what the problem "is". This capability is especially useful in areas such as the medical field where multiple diseases may possess similar symptoms, with only one symptom differentiating two illnesses. Watson could potentially find these differences through the process of elimination, dismiss what sickness a patient is not suffering from, and then tell doctors what illness the patient does have after narrowing its search results down to one final answer. This real-world problem-solving method is one of the uses IBM hopes to employ Watson's software for.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Alvarado, et al. "Project Joshua Blue: Design Considerations for Evolving an Emotional Mind in a Simulated Environment", Retrieved on 2011-1-19.
  2. ↑ Binarydissent "Project Joshua Blue & Diffuse Artificial Thought", Retrieved on 2011-1-19
  3. ↑ Terasem Movement Foundation. "Computer Technology Research", Retrieved on 2011-1-19
  4. ↑ IBM. "Deep Blue", Retrieved on 2011-2-3.
  5. ↑ USA TODAY. , Retrieved on 2011-2-3
  6. ↑ Is Watson the smartest machine on earth?, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department, UMBC, 2011-02-10, retrieved 2011-02-11

See also

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