Cool Science

Chuong's system captures the 3d shape of insects.

3D is in! 3D movies and computer games are increasingly popular, but the technology can be used for more than just cool special effects – scientists can get a lot of information from a simulated 3D object. But it can be hard making these 3D objects. To help, Dr Chuong Nguyen from CSIRO is developing a simple system of capturing the shapes and colours of insects.

The first step is to take a lot of 2D photos of the insect. They are taken from lots of different angles, to capture as much detail as possible. A calibrating pattern is placed underneath the insect and is used to work out precisely where the camera was when each photo was taken. Continue Reading

Chatbots can be a bit frustrating when real, live human beings are trying to have a conversation with them, but they are hilarious when they talk to each other. These chatbots are childish, taunting, snippy and even philosophical. They don’t make much sense but are delightful to watch.

These chatbots were developed by researchers at Cornell University. Rather than becoming irritated by attempting to communicate with these chatbots, one can now be entertained by watching them communicate with one another.

These Cheverbots, developed by artificial intelligence programmer Rollo Carpenter, have avatars of a South Asian female and a British male. Their software uses the phrases that it has picked up from the millions of conversations it has had with actual human beings online.

One one point in the video, the man tells the female that she is unhelpful and a “meanie.” She also irritatingly tells him that she’s answered all of his questions, and then they have a deep and humorous discussion about God and religion. The male even zings the woman, making fun of her memory, which is bad for a woman. The interaction ends with the woman asking the man if he would like to have a body. After he answers in the affirmative, she said “Au revoir.” to him, surprising me with her knowledge of a bit of French.

These clever bots one the British Computer Society Machine Intelligence competition in 2010. The best prize any chatbot developer could hope to win is the Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence. It comes with a prize of $100,000 and the developers must try their hand at convincing human judges that it’s an actual human being. IEEE Spectrum’s Evan Ackerman tells us that the first chatbot to actually do this successfully will be what Artificial Intelligence truly is. Keeping these amusing chatbots around, though, would really be great in either case!