Robot Language

 robots, communication, Luc SteelsA meditation by Visual Thesaurus’s Orin Hargraves on how robots might develop language. He includes an enlightening TED talk with Luc Steels (Vrje Universiteit Brussels, Artificial Intelligence Lab) on experiments with robots’ learning to speak on their own through networks and the complex connections between ideas, rather than through a programmed language provided by humans. Descriptions of some of Steels’s work are embodied in this review.

When researchers allow two robots, who see the world from their own unique vantage points, to invent a way to communicate, they must come up with their own concepts and vocabulary (video). (This sounds depressingly like humans, the “unique vantage point” part and malleable vocabulary.) How will they self-organize language? Will it develop in ways we can understand, that relate to the way humans experience the world? Fascinating.

 

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