Company » Media
03-2009 Ben Goertzel [...advocates of a “cognitive architecture” based approach (whose talks dominated the second day of the conference) argue that specific algorithms for program learning, reasoning, perception and the like are less essential than the overall mind-architecture in which these are interrelated. Examples of this sort of approach are the SOAR architecture championed at the conference by John Laird and his students, and my own OpenCog Prime and Novamente Cognition Engine architectures, both of which aim to embed program learning more general frameworks
...]
08-2008 Dan Kaplan [...Nintendog’s behaviors were scripted, its personality restricted to a handful of breeds. On the other hand, Novamente, a company that aims eventually to develop a super-smart artificial intelligence (AI), says that its current technology will make such limitations remnants of the past
...]
03-2008 Celeste Biever [...Novamente has a few tricks up its sleeve to stop people from getting bored. For starters, the synthetic characters will learn quickly as more and more people use them. Although each pet has its own "brain", Novamente's servers will pool knowledge from all the brains. So once one pet has mastered one trick, it will be much easier for another one to master it, too
...]
03-2008 Patrick Tucker [...Like Norvig and Pell, Ben Goertzel, a long-haired, jeans-clad AI superstar and author of From 'Complexity to Creativity' (Plenum, 1997), also sees the birth of AGI as intimately bound up in the Internet. But Goertzel believes that online games offer a more promising avenue of research than search engines alone...
...]
09-2007 Mark Ward [...Researchers at US firm Novamente have created software that learns by controlling avatars in virtual worlds. Initially the AIs will be embodied in pets that will get smarter by interacting with the avatars controlled by their human owners
...]
09-2007 Heather Havenstein [...Novamente LLC, a San Francisco-based AI company, plans to detail its new product and how it will operate it in virtual worlds next month at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in San Jose. Ben Goertzel, Novamente's CEO and chief scientist, said that virtual worlds are an ideal environment to "embody" AI software, to give it a form to allow it to "learn" by interacting with virtual animals and humans...]
09-2007 Jacob Silverman [...While we already deal with some virtual AI -- notably in action games against computer-controlled "bots" or challenging a computer opponent to chess -- the work of Novamente, Electric Sheep Company and other firms has the potential to initiate a new age of virtual AI, one where, for better or worse, humans and artificial intelligences could potentially be indistinguishable...]
09-2007 Andy Chalk [...Novamente said it had developed a "cognition engine" that would act as the thinking part of the AI, while "the virtual world provides the body," according to company founder Dr. Ben Goertzel. Goertzel said both research and business reasons led Novamente to using virtual worlds for its AI development, and that there would likely be a strong market for "smart" virtual pets in them. "There are a lot of virtual pets out there and none of them have much intelligence," he said...]
09-2007 Geoff Duncan [...Developers like Novamente aim to advance artificial intelligence applications by taking the real world out of the equation: and virtual worlds like Second Life offer just the means to do that. Instead of having to develop (say) an artificial vision system which continually take snapshots of the real world, attempts to identify objects, people, and even expressions, an artificial intelligence in a virtual world doesn't have to worry about comprehending its environment: the virtual world is effectively a database it can query and interact with, and the capabilities of the world - gravity, lighting, physical simulation - are already known...]
09-2007 Ronald Bailey [...As far as I could tell, many of the would-be progenitors of independent AIs at the Summit are concluding that the best way to create an AI is to rear one like one would rear a human child. "The only pathway is way we walked ourselves," argued Sam Adams who honchoed IBM's Joshua Blue Project. That project aimed to create an artificial general intelligence (AGI) with the capabilities of a 3-year old toddler.
In a similar vein, Novamente's Ben Goertzel is working to create self-improving AI avatars and let them loose in virtual worlds like Second Life. They could be virtual babies or pets that the denizens of Second Life would want to play with and teach. They would have virtual bodies and senses that enable them to explore their worlds and to become socialized. However, unlike real babies, these AI babies have an unlimited capacity for boosting their level of intelligence...]
Novamente Updates