IFOMIND

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Machine intelligence competition 2005 #1

Judge comments

Will robots one day rule the world? For decades this notion has both fascinated and terrified humans, our hungry imagination fed by Hollywood blockbusters and intriguing sci-fi novels. Now a new generation of robots promises an astonishing breakthrough in the world of Artificial Intelligence as they become capable of cognitive thought processes.

The 2005 Fourth British Computer Society’s Annual Prize for Progress towards Machine Intelligence sponsored by Electrolux has been won by IFOMIND, a mobile robot system that demonstrates intelligence as it meets a new object in its world. Based on Khepera, a robot commercially available from K-Team, the machine intelligence system was designed and programmed by a team led by Professor David Bell from Queens University, Belfast. It beat stiff competition to win the award, such as AI guru, Rollo Carpenter and his witty conversational companion, George, as well as an intelligent portal building system and a talented robot based on the popular game of Connect 4.

About IFOMIND

IFOMIND reacts initially in an ‘instinctive’ way to its first perception of an unknown object that it encounters; at first it is generally fearful. However, because the robot is equipped with a human-like capability of inquisitiveness, it realises that it can react in another way and does not have to be scared of something that may not be harmful to it. So, the robot observes the object from a distance and takes note of how it behaves and how it reacts to different approaches; the robot is then able to decide on the best approach- or whether to avoid it. This knowledge can then be retained by the robot as it carries on and meets many more objects. This is a remarkable leap forward in the domain of Machine Intelligence as IFOMIND is able to use logical thought processes in order to decide the best way to interact with the objects that it meets. The implications of this are huge, for example as David Bell from the IFOMIND team explains, “A system that can observe events in an unknown scenario, learn and participate as a child would is a major challenge in AI. We have not achieved this, but we think we’ve made a small advance.” - David Bell
IFOMIND in action

David likens the reaction of the robot to the reaction of the tiger in an ancient Chinese folk story from the Tang Dynasty. In the story, the tiger encounters an animal it has never seen before (in this case a donkey). To start with the tiger is wary - even rather frightened - of this larger, noisy ‘object’. But its hunger and pride (equivalent to the robots pre-programmed instinct for curiosity) is even greater than the instinct to run away. So the tiger waits, watches and teases the donkey, and finally concludes it is no threat and attacks. In the robot’s case it waits and watches to see if can get some new information.

The other members of the QUB team were QingXiang Wu and Marcel Ono, and the work was partially funded by Invest Northern Ireland.

A few arbitrary other nominees and winners

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