Connect with us

Grand Theft Auto V is generally considered a masterpiece of a game. With near perfect critical reviews and a fanbase that continues to grow even years after release, there’s no doubt that developer Rockstar created a really solid game with a thriving online community. It seems that the influence of Grand Theft Auto V is extending beyond a simple video game, however, as the environment of Los Santos is being used in scientific simulations to improve the performance of the next wave of driverless cars.

Princeton Professor Alain Kornhauser has praised the rich and complex traffic environment of Grand Theft Auto V, saying it’s “the richest virtual environment that we could extract data from.”

Though it may seem strange to use a video game environment to test real world software, the world of Los Santos is very complex and reflects the high amount of variables driverless cars would run into on the road in real life. With unpredictable pedestrians, a wide range and design of roads, varying locations of traffic signals, and over 14 types of weather, Grand Theft Auto V provides an environment that can push driverless car software to its limits.

Grand Theft Auto V is especially useful to researchers, as the sandbox environment allows them to run simulations over and over again thousands of time – a feat that’s easier said than done when it comes to the real world. While real world tests will obviously have to follow, a complex video game environment is a great first line test for driverless cars that have to be able to react to a dynamic and unpredictable environment.

The application of Grand Theft Auto V to scientific pursuits is extremely exciting, as gamers have also struggled to get the main stream to accept the legitimacy of video games as an art form and an extreme technological accomplishments. Many outside the gaming community have no idea how far video games have come from the days of the NES, and many cutting edge advancements in how we can push computers to the limits have come out of programming for video games.

With how huge the idea of driverless cars are becoming in the world of science and transportation, it’s cool that such a great game and studio will get some attention from those who may have had no reason to pick up such a rewarding and interesting hobby that continues to grow and innovate.

As Editor here at GeekReply, I'm a big fan of all things Geeky. Most of my contributions to the site are technology related, but I'm also a big fan of video games. My genres of choice include RPGs, MMOs, Grand Strategy, and Simulation. If I'm not chasing after the latest gear on my MMO of choice, I'm here at GeekReply reporting on the latest in Geek culture.

Artificial Intelligence

ChatGPT Will Soon “See, Hear, And Speak” With Its Latest AI Update

blank

Published

on

blank

A major update to ChatGPT lets the chatbot respond to images and voice conversations. The AI will hear your questions, see the world, and respond.

OpenAI, the non-profit group behind ChatGPT and DALL-E, announced the “multimodal” update in a blog post on Monday, saying it will add voice and image features to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise over the next two weeks.

The post said it would be available for other groups “soon after.” It was unclear when it would be added to free versions.

Part of this update may be like Siri and Alexa, where you can ask a question and get the answer.

Anyone who’s used ChatGPT knows its AI isn’t a sterile search engine. It can find patterns and solve complex problems creatively and conversationally.

blank

According to OpenAI, “Snap a picture of a landmark while traveling and have a live conversation about what’s interesting about it” could expand these abilities. To decide what to make for dinner, take pictures of your fridge and pantry at home and ask questions for a recipe. Take a photo, circle the problem set, and have it share hints with your child after dinner to help them with a math problem.

This development “opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications,” said OpenAI. They added that it will pose “new risks, such as the potential for malicious actors to impersonate public figures or commit fraud.”

The update currently only allows voice chat with AI trained with specific voice actors. It seems you can’t ask, “Read this IFLScience article in the voice of Stephen Hawking.”

However, current AI technology can achieve that.

Continue Reading

Artificial Intelligence

Track People and Read Through Walls with Wi-Fi Signals

blank

Published

on

blank

Recent research has shown that your Wi-Fi router’s signals can be used as a sneaky surveillance system to track people and read text through walls.

Recently, Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists developed a deep neural network that digitally maps human bodies using Wi-Fi signals.

It works like radar. Many sensors detect Wi-Fi radio waves reflected around the room by a person walking. This data is processed by a machine learning algorithm to create an accurate image of moving human bodies.

“The results of the study reveal that our model can estimate the dense pose of multiple subjects, with comparable performance to image-based approaches, by utilizing WiFi signals as the only input,” the researchers wrote in a December 2022 pre-print paper.

The team claims this experimental technology is “privacy-preserving” compared to a camera, despite concerns about intrusion. The algorithm can only detect rough body positions, not facial features and appearance, so it could provide a new way to monitor people anonymously.

They write, “This technology may be scaled to monitor the well-being of elder people or just identify suspicious behaviors at home.”

Recent research at the University of California Santa Barbara showed another way Wi-Fi signals can be used to spy through walls. They used similar technology to detect Wi-Fi signals through a building wall and reveal 3D alphabet letters.

WiFi still imagery is difficult due to motionlessness. “We then took a completely different approach to this challenging problem by tracing the edges of the objects,” said UC Santa Barbara electrical and computer engineering professor Yasamin Mostofi.

 

Continue Reading

Artificial Intelligence

A futurist predicts human immortality by 2030

blank

Published

on

blank

Ray Kurzweil, a computer scientist and futurist, has set specific timelines for humanity’s immortality and AI’s singularity. If his predictions are correct, you can live forever by surviving the next seven years.

Kurzweil correctly predicted in 1990 that a computer would beat human world chess champions by 2000, the rise of portable computers and smartphones, the shift to wireless technology, and the Internet’s explosion before it was obvious.

He even checked his 20-year-old predictions in 2010. He claims that of his 147 1990 predictions for the years leading up to 2010, 115 were “entirely correct” 12 were essentially correct, and 3 were entirely wrong.

Of course, he miscalculates, predicting self-driving cars by 2009.

Though bold (and probably wrong), immortality claims shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Kurzweil has made bold predictions like this for years, sticking to his initial dates.

“2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence,” Kurzweil said in 2017. “I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.”

Kurzweil predicts we will “advance human life expectancy” by “more than a year every year” by 2030. Part of this progress toward the singularity 15 years later will involve nanobots in our bloodstream repairing and connecting our brain to the cloud. When this happens, we can send videos (or emails if you want to think about the duller aspects of being a freaking cyborg) from our brains and backup our memories.

Kurzweil believes the singularity will make humans “godlike” rather than a threat.

We’ll be funnier. Our sexiness will increase. We’ll express love better,” he said in 2015.

“If I want to access 10,000 computers for two seconds, I can do that wirelessly,” he said, “and my cloud computing power multiplies ten thousandfold. We’ll use our neocortex.”

“I’m walking along and Larry Page comes, and I need a clever response, but 300 million modules in my neocortex won’t work. One billion for two seconds. Just like I can multiply my smartphone’s intelligence thousands-fold today, I can access that in the cloud.”

Nanobots can deliver drug payloads into brain tumors, but without significant advances in the next few years, it’s unlikely we’ll get there in seven years. Paralyzed patients can now spell sentences and monkeys can finally play Pong with brain-computer interfaces.

Kurzweil says we’re far from the future, with human-AI interactions mostly the old way. His accuracy will be determined by time. Fortunately, his predictions predict plenty of time.

Continue Reading

Trending