WRITER: Kim Cretors, (706) 542-6927, [email protected]
CONTACT: Michael Covington, (706) 542-0359, [email protected]
Don Potter, (706) 542-0361, [email protected]
Paul Apostolik, [email protected]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MAKES ITS HOLLYWOOD DEBUT BUT ALFRED, THE POKER-PLAYING "A.I." BOT, IS ALREADY HARD AT WORK AT UGA
ATHENS, Ga. -- With the opening of one of the most anticipated -- and most mysterious -- movies of the summer set for June 29, Steven Spielberg's latest project "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" has people talking. But A.I. is not just the stuff of fiction and film.
University of Georgia cognitive science major Paul Apostolik has created his own "A.I." life form: Alfred, the poker-playing bot. In just a few days, Alfred played 20,000 hands of on-line poker, and his earnings averaged close to 200% of the original bet for each hand he played. Alfred is a project for the probability portion of Apostolik's discrete mathematics class taught by Nelson Rushton at UGA's Artificial Intelligence Center.
Artificial intelligence is the computer modeling of intelligent behavior, including, but not limited to, modeling the human mind. It is an interdisciplinary field where computer science intersects with philosophy, psychology, linguistics, engineering and other fields. UGA's Artificial Intelligence Center is an interdepartmental research and instructional center within the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
Most researchers in the field would agree that artificial intelligence is very different from what is presented on a Hollywood film screen. While Spielberg's "A.I." is about a robot boy who learns to love as a human might, the point of A.I. research is to "build machines that do things that humans can't," says Michael Covington, Ph.D., associate director of the UGA A.I. Center. "We want to build tools that give SUPERhuman performance."
Alfred is a prototype for a production system designed to play on-line poker games. He is being tested with one of pogo.com's risk-free computer poker games. Alfred, then, uses the same interface that human users have. He looks at the screen to see what cards he has and uses a mouse to discard the ones he does not want, just as any human user might. Thus Alfred is just like any other computer poker player, except that he can play for days at a time and he will never get tired and start playing poorly.
Alfred divides the approximately 2.6 million possible poker hands into classes and uses those classes to calculate the probabilities of particular hands, choosing the best. In theory, Alfred will play poker as well as poker can be played. "Alfred is an interesting example of how complex the tools of humanity are becoming," says Apostolik.
There are several other research projects being conducted at UGA's A.I. Center, such as an extremely small web server that is about the weight of a fountain pen and only slightly larger. The server, known as Boethius (http://boethius.ai.uga.edu.), was designed with a standard network input to enable a web connection and is currently housed in UGA's microelectronics laboratory.
Covington says the goal of researchers is to build a natural language interface for this and other such servers, thus allowing users to remotely control and program computer appliances "in plain English." According to Covington, one practical application for such a server is programming it to notify the home user who is upstairs in the study when a washer and dryer cycle is complete downstairs in the laundry room.
While there may not be six-legged metallic creatures crawling around UGA's A.I. Center, it is a very busy place. Don Potter, professor of computer science and graduate coordinator for the center, explains that there are two main elements involved in robotics: mechanics and reasoning. In general the A.I. lab at UGA focuses on reasoning.
Potter helped develop an A.I. system for the U.S.D.A. Forest Service that assists foresters in eradication of gypsy moths. "So-called intelligent information systems help humans make decisions on big issues," says Potter. The system developed for the Forest Service conducts risk assessments on various ways to combat the moths, which in turn helps forest managers determine how best to eradicate the pests.
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