Are you smarter than a four-year old?

RPI researchers have apparently created an avatar in Second Life driven by an AI equivalent to a four-year old human child. Sounds pretty interesting, and could be a good reason to check out Second Life, although I imagine it would be difficult to locate this particular character in the "game."

Currently, the team is grappling with computational tractability issues to do with the sorting of growing amounts of knowledge that is collected as a artificially intelligent character matures.

Massive parallelism perhaps?

A possible future application of this technology could be cost-effective solutions for pesky child-labor laws for TV game shows...

Delusions of Grandeur

An article has been floating around the web that overstates the importance of video game artificial intelligence.

"A lot of the most interesting work in artificial intelligence is being done by game developers," says Bruce Blumberg, senior scientist at Blue Fang Games in Waltham, and formerly a professor at MIT's Media Lab.

I don't agree. I think this (just like everything else, right?) is a problem of semantics. Consider this quote:

"As soon as we solve a problem, instead of looking at the solution as AI, we come to view it as just another computer system." - Martha Pollack

Researchers all over the world are doing exciting and relevant work in AI, yet we don't recognize it at such. Consider the work by Google in machine translation, by Stanford and other in autonomous navigation, and by scores of groups in data mining. I would argue that these are monumentally important advancements, far greater than the incrementally improved enemy combat tactics in Halo, yet most people don't recognize them as artificial intelligence.

AI has a PR issue. Perhaps AAAI needs an advocacy arm?