Interesting Stuff

Yeah. The title says it all. This morning I went to a talk about how the neocortex works, which was awesome. After that, we spent the rest of the day working on the robot. Today was incredibly stressful, and all of us gave up hope at some point. People finally realized that despite Ben’s claims, we haven’t actually been following waypoints in Wander Mode. We also found that the robot just stops if it’s approaching an object and then can’t find it any more. At one point, both Monte Carlo Localization and arrow following stopped working. Argh! However, when 6:00 rolled around and the judges came to see our stuff, our robot performed absolutely perfectly. It certainly hadn’t done that well yet in the conference, and it’s possible that this was the best run ever. We had 2 different parts: first, we had the robot go out in Arrow Following Mode, follow an arrow, find the beach ball, and bring it back to our table. We then had it go out in Waypoint Following Mode, find an orange dinosaur, then an orange cone, then an orange bowl. It followed a couple more arrows during this part. We then stopped it and showed the judges the map – the robot’s dead reckoning had been pretty good, and MCL made it perform perfectly! It identified all objects correctly, followed all arrows correctly, brought the beach ball back correctly, and plotted this all on the map correctly. I think Mac might have helped the robot put the beach ball back down, but I’m not sure about that. The judges asked us questions about our shape recognition, homebrew laser rangefinder, homebrew sonar, MCL, waypoint system, etc, etc, and we answered all of their questions without faltering! Ricco did tell one of the judges the incorrect way we find arrows (she explained the way we used to do it, before we had connected components and ellipse fitting with coordinate-free line fitting), but I explained how it currently works to another judge. The head judge was Manuela Veloso (sp?) (she’s in charge of the whole conference, and also heads up the Aibo soccer stuff at CMU), and I think she was pretty impressed with the whole thing. The other two judges, who I didn’t know, were impressed too. There was also a guy from the Pittsburgh Tribune who took photos of our robot and took down our names. With any luck, we (by which I mean our names and a pic of the robot) will be on the second page of the Local section of tomorrow’s paper.

Officially, this is a competition, and there is supposedly a winner. However, with 4-6 teams entered (depending on who you ask), it has turned into more of an exhibition. There might not be a winner. If there is, however, I think we have a great shot at it. The robot from Stony Brook was quite impressive in that the team built all their own hardware, and they really knew their stuff. However, they seemed to greatly underestimate how long it would take to code stuff up (for instance, when we met them, they claimed that they were going to implement SLAM in the next 2 days)(SLAM is Simultaneous Localization And Mapping, and is hard enough that I don’t believe that any other team attempted it). They had neat ideas, though: Their robot had a grasper that moved up and down, so it could pick things up off the floor or the table, if they had gotten it to pick up anything at all. The team from UMass Lowell had an impressive, $60,000 All Terrain Robot that was intended for urban search and rescue. Consequently, it was built like a tank, was completely decked out with sensors, pan/tilt/zoom cameras, a GPS, a wireless network, a high-end laser rangefinder, a spotlight, and about 2 dozen high-end sonar units, but it could do little more than follow a trail of green paper on the floor (similar to, but not as fancy as, our arrow following) and identify a few objects. The team from University of New Orleans (I think it was them, but I’m not sure) had another very expensive machine (I believe it was a Pioneer model from iRobot (the company, not the book/movie)), though it couldn’t do very much that I could see. It found an orange dinosaur and then turned in a circle avoiding the dinosaur and trying to find the orange cone. However, when I saw it, it was facing directly away from the cone, was slowly turning in a circle, and had the “low battery” light flashing. I feel kinda bad for them, though I didn’t get to see the first part of their run, and it’s possible they did something awesome. The team from University of Sherbrooke decided to skip the scavenger hunt in favor of the Robot Challenge (that’s the one where they had the robot attend the conference). From what I gathered, their robot, Sparticus, mananged to register for the conference, go to one of the talks, and then present its own poster session. It is incredibly impressive, as I mentioned yesterday. Luckily, however, it’s not competition for us. I’m not sure who else is in the contest, but I’ve got a pretty good feeling about this. If nothing else, there is no way we could possibly have gotten our robot to behave any better because it performed perfectly, and that’s really all you can ask for in the end. I’m pretty psyched about today. Tomorrow we’re giving a 10 minute presentation about our robot, and hopefully I’ll get to go hear Martin Keane give a talk on genetic algorithms (roughly speaking, it’s a way to evolve good, though not necessarily optimal, solutions to really hard problems). Hurrah!

Wow. I haven’t posted in a while, mostly because I have been crazy-busy. First, here’s the quick version of the news from last week and earlier: Spain and Canada legalized gay marriage, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor resigned, a branch of Al Qaeda blew up four tube stops in London.

OK. Here’s the main update – since Friday afternoon, I have been in Pittsburgh at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence Conference. We have entered our robot in the scavenger hunt. Ideally, it will go around the floor finding and identifying items. It will follow arrows, find the beach ball, and return it to our table. It will plot everything it finds on a map (we’re only doing Monte Carlo Localization instead of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping, so we had to build the map ourselves Saturday night). However, the lighting conditions are inconsistent at best, and the carpet has a huge pattern on it that hits almost all of our color definitions. We’ll see what happens there.

This place is absolutely incredible. As I remarked to Mac yesterday at the poster session, CMU was giving people free rides on a Segway (for those of you who don’t know, it’s a self-balancing scooter, and it’s awesome), and that was the most boring thing in the room! There is a team from Quebec who has entered a robot in the Challenge event (basically, they need to have the robot attend the conference), and it looks like they’ll actually be able to do it! Their robot, Spartacus, has already waited in line and registered itself for the conference, it has attended several talks, and I believe it can present at its own poster session. It puts our robot to shame, but they’ve had 15 people working for 3 years with a $50,000 budget. Our robot took 4 people $600 over probably 4 months. Still, I’d say we’re better than most of the teams in the scavenger hunt. Nonetheless, Spartacus’ mapping capabilities alone are incredible and awesome, not to mention its ability to understand what you speak to it, read signs on the walls, speak back to you, etc, etc. For those of you who are interested, the way it maps things is your usual idea with a laser rangefinder whose values are compared to the odometry to find out where things are. Ordinarily, this is a bad idea because odometry from your wheels is inherently inaccurate. However, they have an accelerometer in the base of the robot, and they use it to correct the errors in odometry when the chassis turns. They are also using sensor flow data from the rangefinder to correct for the odometric errors when the robot goes forward/backward. It’s incredible.

This morning, Marvin Minsky (who wrote Society of the Mind and has just come out with a new book whose name I don’t remember) gave the keynote speech, and he was surprisingly hilarious. I’ve heard talks about programs that can create debates based on formal argumentation. I’ve seen talks about multi-agent robot swarms learning together (including some guys from the RoboCup soccer league). Stuff about tool use in animals and how we can use what we learn from them to make better robots. Computational models of the cerebral cortex. Markov decision processes. Knowledge manipulation in intelligent systems (this was a really cool talk).

It’s a bit overwhelming, just because there are so many cool things going on here. Tekkotsu had a booth where they were demoing their kinematics on the Aibo (you move its paw around, and using just the sensors in the motors in the joints, it knows where the paw is and can move the head to look at it. This works even when you cover up all the cameras, which blew me away!). There’s a group with a robotic blimp here. The CMU team also has a robot that runs on top of another Segway (it was on Slashdot a couple months ago, but I don’t have time to find links for you right now). This place is absolutely incredible. We have literally been doing stuff at all times here – Friday we checked in and built most of our robot. Saturday, we finished our robot and built a small, demo version with almost no features to put at our table and show off. We then made the map and looked at most of the posters around, and saw some of the other robots. We also started to build our map, which we finished up Sunday afternoon. Sunday evening was the beginning of the scavenger hunt, and we showed off the arrow following and our ability to identify stuff by shape (we can tell the difference between an orange bowl, an orange cone, and an orange dinosaur). We sort of did the beach ball pushing too, but that didn’t work well because our color definitions were off. We left the hotel around 9:30 and found the only restaurant that was still open at 10:00 for dinner. Today, we went to the keynote speech (by Minsky) starting at 8:30, and continued going to talks until 6:30. Dinner at 7:00, then a nap. I think we’ve got the rest of the evening off as well. Whew!

Oh! Another, absolutely fantastic thing we saw today was the Game Playing Competition. 6 groups/individuals have written general game-playing programs! Before each round, the programs are given the rules to the next game (including what a legal move is, how play works, and the object of the game). The programs are then given half an hour to think about how to play, and then they play. I saw them play a variation of Othello on a diamond-shaped board where the winner has the fewest pieces on the board at the end, a round of Chinese Checkers, and a game called Corridor (the object is to get to the other side of the board. During your turn, you can move one square in any direction, or place a wall anywhere you want, presumably to block your opponent). The amazing thing is that these programs could play all of these games well, without having ever seen them before! The winner of the Competition turned out to be a Harvey Mudd alum named Jim who now goes to UCLA. There are actually about 5 HMC alums here, plus the 4 of us, plus Prof Thom (who officiated a set of talks today), and Prof Dodds who is supposed to be here, but hasn’t been seen at the conference since yesterday afternoon. It’s pretty cool.

To sum up, this is the most intellectual stimulation I have ever seen in a single spot, ever. and everyone here is into CS, robotics, and AI! And there are still 2 days left! It’s fantastic. I’m practically in ferret shock.

First off, I’d like to say thanks to anyone who signed a petition to give the Corporation for Public Broadcasting its funding back. It sounds like, for the most part, the House listened to us on this one.

The big news for today is that the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, decided that cities are allowed to take people’s property whenever they want, as long as it can be claimed to be for economic progress. Naturally, people must be given just compensation for the property, as mandated by the 5th Amendment. However, I personally think this was an awful ruling. As Justice O’Connor dissented, “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random… The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”

In other news, some going back several days since I’m behind, the Republicans are still pushing Social Security, even though the general public seems to be quite against it. The UN is still not allowed to investigate the potential abuses at Guantanamo Bay. Rumsfeld is now advocating simply not ever having an exit strategy for Iraq, because it tells the terrorists how long they need to wait before we give up. Syria is still assassinating Lebanese people who oppose them, even though they claim to be out of the country. Speaking of which, the anti-Syrians got an overwhelming mandate in the recent election, so I suspect that some sort of ethnic (?) cleansing/guerilla war will ensue soon. The Lebanese are technologically decades behind the Syrians, so this should be interesting, though bloody.

OK… that seems like it’s about it for at least the moment. There certainly is a lot of news this week!

With the right-wing crazies in power again, the House of Representatives has voted for a constitutional amendment banning flag burning. Although it doesn’t pragmatically matter whether or not people can legally burn flags, this seems like a huge symbolic battle. The proponents of the amendment claim that this will safegaurd the symbol of our freedom, and burning a flag is disrespectful to the soldiers who have died defending it in the past. However, as this article notes, “if the flag needs protection at all, it needs protection from members of Congress who value the symbol more than the freedoms that the flag represents.” Impinging on our freedoms to honour those selfsame freedoms seems like exactly the sort of thing that the flag stands against. This goes right back to one of my favourite quotes: “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend with my life your right to say it.”

I’m inclined to say that Batman Begins kicked several different kinds of the proverbial ass.

On an unrelated and much scarier note, last month there was an art exhibition at Columbia College in Chicago, which had, among other things, a picture of President Bush with a gun to his head. Although this was simply an art show, and it had already done quite well in Pennsylvania with no complaints, the Secret Service payed a visit to it, and started asking a lot of questions about the artists, their families, etc. In protest to this, another publisher/artist began to make collages of Bush with guns, as a symbolic protest to the Secret Service’s inquiries. He, too, became the subject of a Secret Service investigation. Although they apparently didn’t try to coerce him, they did strongly suggest that he “retract” his art. I find this absolutely frightening – the government is now doing covert investigations into anyone that disagrees with them. This is also not the first time I’ve seen something like this, and I suspect that there are many, many more instances out there that I haven’t found yet. Does anyone have any ideas about how to stop this sort of thing? Who is in charge of this? Who can I write to/talk to/contact in another way to try to stop this from happening again? I find the whole thing mildly terrifying, and much more fascist than I would like to think my country is capable of.

Although there have been a number of hoaxes talking about the government planning on killing off public broadcasting (including both PBS and NPR), this time it seems to be, however tentatively, for real. Please, please, if you enjoy shows like Sesame Street, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and Arthur, sign a petition such as this one and email your representatives in the House.

the Bush administration is (again) apparently a bunch of bald-faced liars. As I hope you have heard by now, the Downing Street Memo was published in the London Times roughly a month ago. It explicitly states that the Bush administration had been planning on invading Iraq at least 8 months before it started, regardless of what the public wanted, and regardless of what the facts stated. They even went so far as to doctor the “facts” to fit their goals. To quote the actual document, “military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” Tony Blair and the Brittish Labor Party has admitted that the memo is, in fact, real, and this is actually what happened. Some people in Washington are saying the same thing. However, the Bush administration failed to comment about the memo for over a month, even though it has been about a month since a congressional request to explain it. Naturally, they denied the claims that intelligence was being fabricated and that war was inevitable. However, more memos are beginning to surface.

The thing that confuses me, however, is the part where the Brittish deliberately tried to get UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq, specifically for the purpose of trying to justify this “inevitable” war (if the inspectors were not let in, it would appear that Iraq had something to hide). Why did the Brittish do this? Why not simply say to the US, “you cannot just invade a country on fabricated evidence. We will not cover your asses,” and told the public about it. This would have given Tony Blair a huge popularity boost, saved thousands of lives, and shown the US that even if it is the only superpower at the moment, it cannot go around invading countries at will. Instead, the Labor Party took a huge dive at the polls (this memo surfaced a short time before the British elections, and although Blair still won, it was by a mere 60% instead of his two previous 90% victories), people would not still be dying in Iraq, and the US has gotten the message that no one will stand in its way, and it can do anything it wants. If anyone has any insight into why the British went along with this, I’d like to hear it.

Mind you, we probably won’t invade any more countries soon, since the army failed to meet recruiting goals for the fourth month in a row, and didn’t even get close to making its reduced back-up goal for the month. Although things like the Stop-Loss Act will help in the short run, it has cut another bite out of recruiting, since people justifiably don’t want to be forced to go back into service. Ironically, I think that now that our armed forces, reserves, and national guard are stretched thinly across Afghanistan and Iraq, now that we are not getting enough recruits to man our forces, now that we have made enemies with most of the world and almost all of the Muslim world, and now that the war has been shown to actually be justified with intentionally falsified claims, we are more susceptible to an attack than before the war in Iraq started.

Here’s the idea: I will post my six favorite songs of the moment and then six people I suggest must do the same.

Songs:
1) “Kindred Spirits” – Liquid Tension Experiment
2) “Riffmaster B” – We Are Scientists
3) “Cruisin’ for a Bluesin'” – Maynard Fergusen
4) “Nothing Else Matters” – Metallica
5) “Destiny” – Zero 7
6) “Flake” – Jack Johnson

People:
1) sneaselcouth
2) lady_of_worlds
3) eve_wyoming
4) conorfrog
5) mockery0
6) muddernh

Sheri and I went to Bridge Etc again tonight. We came in 3rd out of 7 partnerships, with an impressive 55% game! I don’t get it. We have misbids, misplays, and all sorts of miscommunications. We’re not really using signals or discards (well, officially, we’re using Odd/Even discards, but I don’t think Sheri made one or saw mine all night). We have very little idea of what each other is bidding, and yet we have come out above average every time we’ve competed. Heck, since school ended, I have taken 3rd place every time I’ve competed. I know I should just be thrilled that I’m doing so well, but the paranoid part of me is wondering if Margaret (the director) is giving me Master Points just because I’m a child to her. Hopefully, that’s not the case.

Tomorrow, Vic Sartor is coming to play with us on campus at 7:00, and I’m pretty psyched about that. He’s a Silver Life Master, and has invented his own convention (called California Club), including Sartor Transfers. After Andrew has hung around so long, people seem to be thinking that Vic is another sketchy guy who hangs out with college students because he has no life. Not the case! At Sheri’s suggestion and Whitney’s encouragement, we invited him! So come play. We’re going to hold the meeting in Sheri’s suite, probably. Unfortunately, neither of us realized that this will start an hour before the barbeque is over. Hm… hopefully, we can push that back to 8:00. We’ll see.

Anywho, I’m tired, so I’m going to bed.