New AI Prize

In AI, we have the famous "Turing Test" and
it's implementation, the Loebner Prize :
http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
What the Loebner Prize has produced are
mindless bots and huge Eliza scripts.
This is not what Alan Turing had in mind.

What the AI community needs is a new AI Prize -
s.th. like the X-Prize. See http://www.xprize.org/
The X-Prize is awarded to the first team
that privately builds & launches a spaceship
able to carry 3 people to 100 km altitude.
It should return safely to Earth and repeat the
launch with the same ship within 2 weeks.

Where is the sense in this ? Space tourism
will allow the rich countries to cause a major
pollution of the environment on the back of the
third world, isn't it polluted enough ? We have
already shot a man to the moon and back. We
know it is possible, and that space is not a
human-friendly environment. There is nothing out
there what only humans can examine or discover.

Although certainly no man will ever leave our solar system,
I like watching Star Wars and Star Trek and I like the
outdated but dazzling NASA technology. When I was
a child, my room was full of large Space Shuttle posters.
Therefore I hate to say this, but manned spaceflight is a
technology that deserves to die. See the article
"Ten techologies that deserve to die" by Bruce Sterling at
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/Sterling1003.asp

He remarks correctly : "Thanks to decades of
biological research, it's now quite clear that
flying around the solar system is bad for one's
health. Without the healthy stresses of gravity
on one's skeleton, human bones decay just as they
do during prolonged bed rest, while muscles atrophy.
Cosmic rays blast through spacecraft walls and human
bodies, while solar flares will fry astronauts as
diligently as any nuclear bomb."

What we can do is to shoot probes and robots
into space. These probes would be more useful
if they can act independent - if they are
equipped with a new kind of AI. And to create
a true AI is one of the current problems behind the
frontiers of knowledge, besides solving quantum
gravity and the last mysteries of molecular
biology.

We need a new kind of AI Prize. It should
be awarded to the first team or company
that privately builds & simulates an agent
able to understand a complex artificial
3D world as complex as the real world.
The agent should have a reusable, scaleable
and adaptive architecture, and it should
be able to learn more details in further
sessions. And we should still be able to
understand the internal architecture of such
an agent. Perhaps this is most difficult condition.

As the difficulty of the conditions is very high -
the task is certainly too difficult for one
scientist alone - the Prize should be very high,
too - let us say a new $10,000,000 Prize -
not more than 1/3 of the price for only *one*
new F-15 jet plane. Only a larger company
or community is able to solve this task. Only
a high Prize will motivate a larger community or
group to tackle it.

A new nuclear aircraft carrier costs approximately
4.5 billion dollars. Each of the planes it carries
costs several millions. Even the intelligent and
smart George W. Bush said ''I had no idea we had
so many weapons, ...what do we need them for?''
when he was told the extent of the U.S. nuclear arsenal
(according to Newsweek, June 25, 2001).

Imagine the US government would disclaim the
ordering of a new aircraft carrier, and would spend
that money for a new AI prize. This could trigger a
technology revolution. Instead the Bush administration
buys one billion dollar cruise missile after the next.
Am I the only one with the feeling that something
goes wrong here ? But perhaps the president already
has some clever plans. I guess we all "misunderestimate"
him. He was at least among the first to notice that
"the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."

George W. Bush is definitely not among the regular readers
of comp.ai. But perhaps Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy,
Bill Joy or Bill Gates ? Are you reading this ?
You can do something useful with all your billions and
billions of dollars..