Nerds around the world are holding their breath.Watson, an IBM supercomputer, is competing against humans on “Jeopardy!” The IBM-built supercomputer is thus far holding his-own in the mind game. Watson’s natural-language search capabilities are currently going to be put to use in other places—possibly medical search.

Yeah, you’re right! There we go.

Welcome to the forum Dextre! Stay with us and watch it happening.

I’ve just read your profile and saw you are interested in the human body. The great thing we are researching parallels with chatbots on this website, for example in our synonym research on virtual human and 3d human (new pages with the result from our research to be published soon). We stumbled on this website for example:

http://www.visiblebody.com

Ever seen this?

What would have if they could animate this model? Or let the model speak and add some AI? You could even see its vocal cords vibrate. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Welcome to the forum Dexter. Hope you have a good time.

Erwin Van Lun - Feb 18, 2011:

What would have if they could animate this model?

Take a look at this: http://www.makehuman.org

MakeHuman(TM) is an open source (so it’s completely free), innovative and professional software for the modelling of 3-Dimensional humanoid characters. Features that make this software unique include a new, highly intuitive GUI and a high quality mesh, optimized to work in subdivision surface mode (for example, Zbrush). Using MakeHuman, a photorealistic character can be modeled in less than 2 minutes; MakeHuman is released under an Open Source Licence (GPL3.0) , and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Wow! Nice find, Hans! I’m not quite sure if I could make a 3D model of Morti using this (Morti’s not exactly shaped like a human in every respect [e.g. ears]), but I’m certainly gonna give it a try.

Very cool project, Hans! Thanks for the link.

Welcome to the forum, “Ultradextre”! Check out our Watson thread here.

One of my other interests is 3D-modelling (I’m using http://www.blender.org). As the makeHuman project is a spin-off from Blender, I’ve been following the project from the beginning. What (I think) is ultimately cool about it, is that they started from just a plainly modelled figure but some university (can’t get the name right now) donated a big database of research-data on human body configuration in relation to race and other markers, to the makeHuman project. When this happened they started development again from scratch, now based on that donated data-set, with the results so far.

I also enjoy creating 3D artwork, but I use several different applications. I have Blender, but don’t use it much. I mainly use Bryce, Daz Studio, Terragen and Carrara, with any post-work done in Paint Shop Pro. I’m not terrific at it, but I do ok; and the artwork I create pleases me, which is all anyone can ask for.

Ok, done hijacking the thread.

tx, updated this thread: http://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/239/

(time to make a real overview :-s )