We’ve in one form or another, watched a Sci-Fi movie about using human brains to control robots or installing a human brain into a robot.
The latter might seem a little extreme but the former is very much possible with today’s technology.
According to Digital Trends, A.I. researchers at the University of Buffalo are gathering 25 gamers to record their brain waves and eye movements when playing video games.
The data will be used to create an A.I. to coordinate a swarm of air and land military robots. 250 of them to be exact. Allowing users to navigate unpredictable terrain and environments in real time.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a US$316,000 grant to the university for the study. Researcher Souma Chowdhury spoke to Digital Trends and said “The project is ongoing, at a pretty aggressive pace. We are around the halfway mark.
“Humans can come up with very unique strategies that an A.I. might not ever learn. A lot of the hype we see in A.I. are in applications that are relatively deterministic environments. But in terms of contextual reasoning in a real environment to get stuff done? That’s still at a nascent stage.”
To speed up the data collection process, the researchers developed a real-time strategy game that takes around 5 to 10 minutes to complete. Chowdhury said that if each gamer plays 5 to 6 games, they would have enough data to train the A.I.
The university’s goal is to make these swarms think more like humans when it comes to problem solving.
And personally, I don’t know if we should be worried about that.
Cover image sourced from WYSS Institute.