This SpringerBrief reveals the latest techniques in computer vision and machine learning on robots that are designed as accurate and efficient military snipers. Militaries around the world are investigating this technology to simplify the time, cost and safety measures necessary for training human snipers. These robots are developed by combining crucial aspects of computer science research areas including image processing, robotic kinematics and learning algorithms. The authors explain how...

This Springer Brief examines the combination of computer vision techniques and machine learning algorithms necessary for humanoid robots to develop “true consciousness.” It illustrates the critical first step towards reaching “deep learning,” long considered the holy grail for machine learning scientists worldwide. Using the example of the iCub, a humanoid robot which learns to solve 3D mazes, the book explores the challenges to create a robot that can perceive its own surroundings. Rather...

Most people are baffled by how computers work and assume that they will never understand them. What they don't realize -- and what Daniel Hillis's short book brilliantly demonstrates -- is that computers' seemingly complex operations can be broken down into a few simple parts that perform the same simple procedures over and over again. Computer wizard Hillis offers an easy-to-follow explanation of how data is processed that makes the operations of a computer seem as straightforward as thos...

Packed with more than a hundred color illustrations and a wide variety of puzzles and brainteasers, Taking Sudoku Seriously uses this popular craze as the starting point for a fun-filled introduction to higher mathematics. How many Sudoku solution squares are there? What shapes other than three-by-three blocks can serve as acceptable Sudoku regions? What is the fewest number of starting clues a sound Sudoku puzzle can have? Does solving Sudoku require mathematics? Jason Rosenhouse...

Artificial Intelligence is no longer the stuff of science fiction.Half a century of research has resulted in machines capable of beating the best human chess players, and humanoid robots which are able to walk and interact with us. But how similar is this 'intelligence' to our own? Can machines really think? Is the mind just a complicated computer program?Addressing major issues in the design of intelligent machines, such as consciousness and environment, and...

This 2010 textbook for advanced undergraduates and graduate students emphasizes algorithms for a range of strategies for locomotion, sensing, and reasoning. It concentrates on wheeled and legged mobile robots but discusses a variety of other propulsion systems. This edition includes advances in robotics and intelligent machines over the ten years prior to publication, including significant coverage of SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) and multi-robot systems. It includes additio...

This book provides a historic overview of what is defined as "soft computing" with its techniques: neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms and cellular automata.

The study addressed in this 'book' puts forward a project that is twofold. Firstly, it discusses the conceptual basis within which it would be possible for the construction of a 'neosentient' system, a machine endowed with the capacity to perceive or feel things in the world, as if manifesting a proto-form of (artificial) consciousness. Secondly, it hypothesizes about the rising of benevolence through the interaction/intra-action, between 'neosentient' machines and their environment, which...

The history of mathematics is filled with major breakthroughs resulting from solutions to recreational problems. Problems of interest to gamblers led to the modern theory of probability, for example, and surreal numbers were inspired by the game of Go. Yet even with such groundbreaking findings and a wealth of popular-level books exploring puzzles and brainteasers, research in recreational mathematics has often been neglected. The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects bring...

The study of self-consciousness helps humans understand themselves and restores their identities. But self-consciousness has been a mystery since the beginning of history, and this mystery cannot be resolved by conventional natural science. In Self-Consciousness, author Masakazu Shoji takes the mystery out of self-consciousness by proposing the idea that the human brain and body are a biological machine.A former VLSI microprocessor designer and semiconductor physicist, Shoji was gu...

Machinery of Mind is a full-scale, indispensable examination of the history, content, politics, and philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. In detail, consecutively but with a keen awareness of the interdisciplinary nature of the field, Johnson traces the history of the burgeoning science from its earliest practitioners to corporation-funded engineers and experts: Roger Schank, Terry Winograd, Doug Lenat and others who are struggling to create machines that can actually think indep...

Dancing humanoids, robotic art installations, and music generated by mathematically precise methods are no longer science fiction; in fact they are the subject of this book. This first-of-its-kind anthology assembles technical research that makes such creations possible. In order to mechanize something as enigmatic and personal as dance, researchers must delve deeply into two distinct academic disciplines: control theory and art. Broadly, this research uses techniques from the world of art...