The computer game bot Turing test is a variant of the Turing test, where a human judge viewing and interacting with a virtual world must distinguish between other humans and video game bots, both interacting with the same virtual world. This variant was first proposed in 2008 by Associate Professor Philip Hingston of Edith Cowan University, and implemented through a tournament called the 2K BotPrize. == History == The computer game bot Turing test was proposed to advance the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational intelligence with respect to video games. It was considered that a poorly implemented bot implied a subpar game, so a bot that would be capable of passing this test, and therefore might be indistinguishable from a human player, would directly improve the quality of a game. It also served to debunk a flawed notion that "game AI is a solved problem." Emphasis is placed on a game bot that interacts with other players in a multiplayer environment. Unlike a bot that simply needs to make optimal human-like decisions to play or beat a game, this bot must make the same decisions while also convincing another in-game player of its human-likeness. == Implementation == The computer game bot Turing test was designed to test a bot's ability to interact with a game environment in comparison with a human player; simply 'winning' was insufficient. This evolved into a contest with a few important goals in mind: There are three participants: a human player, a computer-game bot, and a judge. The bot needs to appear more human-like than the human player. Judge scores are not bipolar — both human and bot can be scored anywhere on a scale from 1 to 5 (1=not humanlike, 5=human). All three participants are to be indistinguishable in the arena, with the exception of a randomly generated name tag, so as to reduce the chance of random elements such as name or appearance influencing the judges. Chat is disabled throughout the match. Bots were not given omniscient powers as they may be in other games. Bots must react only to the data that might be reasonably available to a human player. Human participants were of a moderate skill range, with no participant either ignorant to the game or capable of playing at a professional level. In 2008, the first 2K BotPrize tournament took place. The contest was held with the game Unreal Tournament 2004 as the platform. Contestants created their bots in advance using the GameBots interface. GameBots had some modifications made so as to adhere to the above conditions, such as removing data about vantage points or weapon damage that unfairly informed the bots of relevant strengths/weaknesses that a human would otherwise need to learn. == Tournament == The first BotPrize Tournament was held on 17 December 2008, as part of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games in Australia. Each competing team was given time to set up and adjust their bots to the modified game client, although no coding changes were allowed at that point. The tournament was run in rounds, each a 10-minute death match. Judges were the last to join the server and every judge observed every player and every bot exactly once, although the pairing of players and bots did change. When the tournament ended, no bot was rated as more human than any player. In subsequent tournaments, run during 2009–2011, bots achieved scores that were increasingly human-like, but no contestant had won the BotPrize in any of these contests. In 2012, the 2K BotPrize was held once again, and two teams programmed bots that achieved scores greater than those of human players. == Successful bots == To date, there have been two successfully programmed bots that passed the computer game bot Turing test: UT^2, a team from the University of Texas at Austin, emphasized a bot that adjusted its behaviour based on previously observed human behaviour and neuroevolution. The team has made their bot available, although a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 is required. Mihai Polceanu, a doctoral student from Romania, focused on creating a bot that would mimic opponent reactions, in a sense 'borrowing' the human-like nature of the opponent. These victors succeeded in the year 2012, Alan Turing's centenary year. == Aftermath == The outcome of a bot that appears more human-like than a human player is possibly overstated, since in the tournament in which the bots succeeded, the average 'humanness' rating of the human players was only 41.4%. This showcases some limits of this Turing test, since the results demonstrate that human behaviour is more complicated and quantitative than was accounted for. In light of this, the BotPrize competition organizers will increase the difficulty in upcoming years with new challenges, forcing competitors to improve their bots. It is also believed that methods and techniques developed for the computer game bot Turing test will be useful in fields other than video games, such as virtual training environments and in improving Human–robot interaction. == Contrasts to the Turing test == The computer game bot Turing test differs from the traditional or generic Turing test in a number of ways: Unlike the traditional Turing test, for example the Chatterbot-style contest held annually by the Loebner Prize competition, the humans who played against the Computer Game Bots are not trying to convince judges they are the human; rather, they want to win the game (i.e., by achieving the highest kill score). Judges are not restricted to awarding only one participant in a match as the 'human' and the other as the 'non-human.' This emphasizes more qualitative rather than polarized findings. With regards to a successful video game bot, this is not to be confused with a claim that the bot is 'intelligent,' whereas a machine that 'passed' the Turing test would arguably have some evidence for its Chatterbot's 'intelligence.' The game Unreal Tournament 2004 was chosen for its commercial availability and its interface for creating bots, GameBots. This limitation on medium is a sharp contrast to the Turing test, which emphasizes a conversation, where possible questions are vastly more numerous than the set of possible actions available in any specific video game. The available information to the participants, humans and bots, is not equal. Humans interact through vision and sound, whereas bots interact with data and events. The judges cannot introduce new events (e.g., a lava pit) to aid in differentiating between human and bot, whereas in a Chatterbot designed system, judges may theoretically ask any question in any manner. The two participants and the judge take part in a three-way interaction, unlike, for example, the paired two-way interaction of the Loebner Prize Contest.
Information extraction
Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents and other electronically represented sources. Typically, this involves processing human language texts by means of natural language processing (NLP). Recent activities in multimedia document processing like automatic annotation and content extraction out of images/audio/video/documents could be seen as information extraction. Recent advances in NLP techniques have allowed for significantly improved performance compared to previous years. An example is the extraction from newswire reports of corporate mergers, such as denoted by the formal relation: MergerBetween ( c o m p a n y 1 , c o m p a n y 2 , d a t e ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {MergerBetween} (\mathrm {company} _{1},\mathrm {company} _{2},\mathrm {date} )} , from an online news sentence such as: "Yesterday, New York based Foo Inc. announced their acquisition of Bar Corp." A broad goal of IE is to allow computation to be done on the previously unstructured data. A more specific goal is to allow automated reasoning about the logical form of the input data. Structured data is semantically well-defined data from a chosen target domain, interpreted with respect to category and context. Information extraction is the part of a greater puzzle which deals with the problem of devising automatic methods for text management, beyond its transmission, storage and display. The discipline of information retrieval (IR) has developed automatic methods, typically of a statistical flavor, for indexing large document collections and classifying documents. Another complementary approach is that of natural language processing (NLP) which has solved the problem of modelling human language processing with considerable success when taking into account the magnitude of the task. In terms of both difficulty and emphasis, IE deals with tasks in between both IR and NLP. In terms of input, IE assumes the existence of a set of documents in which each document follows a template, i.e. describes one or more entities or events in a manner that is similar to those in other documents but differing in the details. An example, consider a group of newswire articles on Latin American terrorism with each article presumed to be based upon one or more terroristic acts. We also define for any given IE task a template, which is a(or a set of) case frame(s) to hold the information contained in a single document. For the terrorism example, a template would have slots corresponding to the perpetrator, victim, and weapon of the terroristic act, and the date on which the event happened. An IE system for this problem is required to "understand" an attack article only enough to find data corresponding to the slots in this template. == History == Information extraction dates back to the late 1970s in the early days of NLP. An early commercial system from the mid-1980s was JASPER built for Reuters by the Carnegie Group Inc with the aim of providing real-time financial news to financial traders. Beginning in 1987, IE was spurred by a series of Message Understanding Conferences. MUC is a competition-based conference that focused on the following domains: MUC-1 (1987), MUC-3 (1989): Naval operations messages. MUC-3 (1991), MUC-4 (1992): Terrorism in Latin American countries. MUC-5 (1993): Joint ventures and microelectronics domain. MUC-6 (1995): News articles on management changes. MUC-7 (1998): Satellite launch reports. Considerable support came from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), who wished to automate mundane tasks performed by government analysts, such as scanning newspapers for possible links to terrorism. == Present significance == The present significance of IE pertains to the growing amount of information available in unstructured form. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, refers to the existing Internet as the web of documents and advocates that more of the content be made available as a web of data. Until this transpires, the web largely consists of unstructured documents lacking semantic metadata. Knowledge contained within these documents can be made more accessible for machine processing by means of transformation into relational form, or by marking-up with XML tags. An intelligent agent monitoring a news data feed requires IE to transform unstructured data into something that can be reasoned with. A typical application of IE is to scan a set of documents written in a natural language and populate a database with the information extracted. == Tasks and subtasks == Applying information extraction to text is linked to the problem of text simplification in order to create a structured view of the information present in free text. The overall goal being to create a more easily machine-readable text to process the sentences. Typical IE tasks and subtasks include: Template filling: Extracting a fixed set of fields from a document, e.g. extract perpetrators, victims, time, etc. from a newspaper article about a terrorist attack. Event extraction: Given an input document, output zero or more event templates. For instance, a newspaper article might describe multiple terrorist attacks. Knowledge Base Population: Fill a database of facts given a set of documents. Typically the database is in the form of triplets, (entity 1, relation, entity 2), e.g. (Barack Obama, Spouse, Michelle Obama) Named entity recognition: recognition of known entity names (for people and organizations), place names, temporal expressions, and certain types of numerical expressions, by employing existing knowledge of the domain or information extracted from other sentences. Typically the recognition task involves assigning a unique identifier to the extracted entity. A simpler task is named entity detection, which aims at detecting entities without having any existing knowledge about the entity instances. For example, in processing the sentence "M. Smith likes fishing", named entity detection would denote detecting that the phrase "M. Smith" does refer to a person, but without necessarily having (or using) any knowledge about a certain M. Smith who is (or, "might be") the specific person whom that sentence is talking about. Coreference resolution: detection of coreference and anaphoric links between text entities. In IE tasks, this is typically restricted to finding links between previously extracted named entities. For example, "International Business Machines" and "IBM" refer to the same real-world entity. If we take the two sentences "M. Smith likes fishing. But he doesn't like biking", it would be beneficial to detect that "he" is referring to the previously detected person "M. Smith". Relationship extraction: identification of relations between entities, such as: PERSON works for ORGANIZATION (extracted from the sentence "Bill works for IBM.") PERSON located in LOCATION (extracted from the sentence "Bill is in France.") Semi-structured information extraction which may refer to any IE that tries to restore some kind of information structure that has been lost through publication, such as: Table extraction: finding and extracting tables from documents. Table information extraction : extracting information in structured manner from the tables. This task is more complex than table extraction, as table extraction is only the first step, while understanding the roles of the cells, rows, columns, linking the information inside the table and understanding the information presented in the table are additional tasks necessary for table information extraction. Comments extraction : extracting comments from the actual content of articles in order to restore the link between authors of each of the sentences Language and vocabulary analysis Terminology extraction: finding the relevant terms for a given corpus Audio extraction Template-based music extraction: finding relevant characteristic in an audio signal taken from a given repertoire; for instance time indexes of occurrences of percussive sounds can be extracted in order to represent the essential rhythmic component of a music piece. Note that this list is not exhaustive and that the exact meaning of IE activities is not commonly accepted and that many approaches combine multiple sub-tasks of IE in order to achieve a wider goal. Machine learning, statistical analysis and/or natural language processing are often used in IE. IE on non-text documents is becoming an increasingly interesting topic in research, and information extracted from multimedia documents can now be expressed in a high level structure as it is done on text. This naturally leads to the fusion of extracted information from multiple kinds of documents and sources. == World Wide Web applications == IE has been the focus of the MUC conferences. The proliferation of the Web, however, intensified the need for developing IE systems that help people
WomanStats Project
The WomanStats Project is a donor-funded research and database project housed at Brigham Young University that "seeks to collect detailed statistical data on the status of women around the world, and to connect that data with data on the security of states." The WomanStats Database aims to provide a comprehensive compilation of information on the status of women in the world. Coders comb the extant literature and conduct expert interviews to find qualitative and quantitative information on over 300 indicators of women's status in 174 countries with populations of at least 200,000. Access to the online database is free. == History and structure == WomanStats began as an outgrowth of a paper Dr. Valerie M. Hudson (of the Brigham Young University Political Science department) and one of her graduate students, Andrea den Boer, published in International Security on the association between national security and the abnormal sex ratio in Asia. After the success and influence of their first article, (later added as one of their top twenty national security articles of that journal of all time), Hudson and den Boer did further research on the connection between the status of women and national security, but found that there was no single database that covered the range of topics that they needed for their research. Consequently, they began compiling information on variables regarding the status of women around the world. The database was officially formed in 2001 and grew exponentially as it later added more variables. The Project went live on the Internet in July 2007. The principal investigators are: Valerie M. Hudson (International Relations), Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill (Psychology, emeritus), and Chad F. Emmett (Geography) all from Brigham Young University, Mary Caprioli from the University of Minnesota, Duluth (International Relations), Rose McDermott from Brown University (International Relations), Andrea Den Boer from the University of Kent at Canterbury in the United Kingdom (International Relations) and S. Matthew Stearmer from the Ohio State University (Sociology; doctoral student). Approximately a dozen undergraduate and graduate students at Brigham Young University and Texas A&M University work at any one time as coders for the project. The coders take the raw quantitative and qualitative data collected in government reports, news articles, research papers, etc. and sort the applicable information on women into categories. They may also implement scales developed by the principal investigators, or that they (the students) themselves have developed. == Database == As of February 2011, the database has 307 variables, covers 174 nations with populations over 200,000, uses 18,015 sources and contains over 111,000 individual data points. All data is referenced to original sources. Not every variable has information for each country; similarly, not all countries have information for each variable: overall, about 70% of country-variable combinations have information. These database coding gaps exist where information is not available or is incomplete, or variables are not collected and reported by governments or international organizations. At times, information from different sources may be contradictory, and the WomanStats Database records this discrepant information for triangulation purposes. == Users and role of the database == The database is meant to help fill a hole in the extant data on the situation of women around the world. WomanStats data and research has been vetted and/or used by the United Nations, the United States Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the World Bank. Their data and research were also used by the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in crafting the International Violence Against Women’s Act. The Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality (IANWGE) of the United Nations has stated that the WomanStats project "filled a major gap in the availability of data on women" (2007). Victor Asal and Mitchell Brown, researchers not affiliated with WomanStats, stated in an article published in Politics and Policy that "one of the most significant challenges of cross-national empirical studies of the prevalence of interpersonal violence is the paucity of available data, particularly reliable data," and that "WomanStats has allowed for an important first glimpse at analyzing the factors related to interpersonal violence." They conclude by stating that "Our findings suggest that, in the same way that larger disciplinary resources have invested in interstate and intrastate war, disciplinary resources need to be expended in creating a data set exploring interpersonal violence. Until the rights and the lives of women and children are taken as seriously as the survival of states by more proactively collaborating on projects like WomanStats, we will continue to only have a small lens through which to understand problems like this." Princeton University professor Evan S. Liberman wrote, "Although data on political regimes and group conflict have been in far greater demand by political scientists than data on gender politics and policies, two gender-related databases provide...examples of innovative HIRDs. Both the Womanstats database project (Hudson et al. 2009) and the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State (RNGS) project (McBride et al. 2008) are well-integrated presentations of quantitative and qualitative data characterizing the quality of gender relations around the world and, in particular, analytic descriptions of the treatment of women."." == Research == The research component of WomanStats focuses on exploring the relationship between the situation of women and the behavior and security of states. Current research initiatives include: Exploring the relationship between violent instability and inequity and family law. Examining the effect of polygyny and marriage market dislocations on the rise of suicide terrorism. Documenting discrepancies between laws on the books and cultural practices on the ground concerning gender issues. Investigating how well the situation of women predicts the peacefulness of nations-states, compared to their variables such as democracy, wealth, and civilization. The Project has published articles in International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Peace and Conflict, Journal of Peace Research, Political Psychology, Cumberland Law Review, and World Political Review, and has a forthcoming book from Columbia University Press.
Concurrency control
In information technology and computer science, especially in the fields of computer programming, operating systems, multiprocessors, and databases, concurrency control ensures that correct results for concurrent operations are generated, while getting those results as quickly as possible. Computer systems, both software and hardware, consist of modules, or components. Each component is designed to operate correctly, i.e., to obey or to meet certain consistency rules. When components that operate concurrently interact by messaging or by sharing accessed data (in memory or storage), a certain component's consistency may be violated by another component. The general area of concurrency control provides rules, methods, design methodologies, and theories to maintain the consistency of components operating concurrently while interacting, and thus the consistency and correctness of the whole system. Introducing concurrency control into a system means applying operation constraints which typically result in some performance reduction. Operation consistency and correctness should be achieved with as good as possible efficiency, without reducing performance below reasonable levels. Concurrency control can require significant additional complexity and overhead in a concurrent algorithm compared to the simpler sequential algorithm. For example, a failure in concurrency control can result in data corruption from torn read or write operations. == Concurrency control in databases == Comments: This section is applicable to all transactional systems, i.e., to all systems that use database transactions (atomic transactions; e.g., transactional objects in Systems management and in networks of smartphones which typically implement private, dedicated database systems), not only general-purpose database management systems (DBMSs). DBMSs need to deal also with concurrency control issues not typical just to database transactions but rather to operating systems in general. These issues (e.g., see Concurrency control in operating systems below) are out of the scope of this section. Concurrency control in Database management systems (DBMS; e.g., Bernstein et al. 1987, Weikum and Vossen 2001), other transactional objects, and related distributed applications (e.g., Grid computing and Cloud computing) ensures that database transactions are performed concurrently without violating the data integrity of the respective databases. Thus concurrency control is an essential element for correctness in any system where two database transactions or more, executed with time overlap, can access the same data, e.g., virtually in any general-purpose database system. Consequently, a vast body of related research has been accumulated since database systems emerged in the early 1970s. A well established concurrency control theory for database systems is outlined in the references mentioned above: serializability theory, which allows to effectively design and analyze concurrency control methods and mechanisms. An alternative theory for concurrency control of atomic transactions over abstract data types is presented in (Lynch et al. 1993), and not utilized below. This theory is more refined, complex, with a wider scope, and has been less utilized in the Database literature than the classical theory above. Each theory has its pros and cons, emphasis and insight. To some extent they are complementary, and their merging may be useful. To ensure correctness, a DBMS usually guarantees that only serializable transaction schedules are generated, unless serializability is intentionally relaxed to increase performance, but only in cases where application correctness is not harmed. For maintaining correctness in cases of failed (aborted) transactions (which can always happen for many reasons) schedules also need to have the recoverability (from abort) property. A DBMS also guarantees that no effect of committed transactions is lost, and no effect of aborted (rolled back) transactions remains in the related database. Overall transaction characterization is usually summarized by the ACID rules below. As databases have become distributed, or needed to cooperate in distributed environments (e.g., Federated databases in the early 1990, and Cloud computing currently), the effective distribution of concurrency control mechanisms has received special attention. === Database transaction and the ACID rules === The concept of a database transaction (or atomic transaction) has evolved in order to enable both a well understood database system behavior in a faulty environment where crashes can happen any time, and recovery from a crash to a well understood database state. A database transaction is a unit of work, typically encapsulating a number of operations over a database (e.g., reading a database object, writing, acquiring lock, etc.), an abstraction supported in database and also other systems. Each transaction has well defined boundaries in terms of which program/code executions are included in that transaction (determined by the transaction's programmer via special transaction commands). Every database transaction obeys the following rules (by support in the database system; i.e., a database system is designed to guarantee them for the transactions it runs): Atomicity - Either the effects of all or none of its operations remain ("all or nothing" semantics) when a transaction is completed (committed or aborted respectively). In other words, to the outside world a committed transaction appears (by its effects on the database) to be indivisible (atomic), and an aborted transaction does not affect the database at all. Either all the operations are done or none of them are. Consistency - Every transaction must leave the database in a consistent (correct) state, i.e., maintain the predetermined integrity rules of the database (constraints upon and among the database's objects). A transaction must transform a database from one consistent state to another consistent state (however, it is the responsibility of the transaction's programmer to make sure that the transaction itself is correct, i.e., performs correctly what it intends to perform (from the application's point of view) while the predefined integrity rules are enforced by the DBMS). Thus since a database can be normally changed only by transactions, all the database's states are consistent. Isolation - Transactions cannot interfere with each other (as an end result of their executions). Moreover, usually (depending on concurrency control method) the effects of an incomplete transaction are not even visible to another transaction. Providing isolation is the main goal of concurrency control. Durability - Effects of successful (committed) transactions must persist through crashes (typically by recording the transaction's effects and its commit event in a non-volatile memory). The concept of atomic transaction has been extended during the years to what has become Business transactions which actually implement types of Workflow and are not atomic. However also such enhanced transactions typically utilize atomic transactions as components. === Why is concurrency control needed? === If transactions are executed serially, i.e., sequentially with no overlap in time, no transaction concurrency exists. However, if concurrent transactions with interleaving operations are allowed in an uncontrolled manner, some unexpected, undesirable results may occur, such as: The lost update problem: A second transaction writes a second value of a data-item (datum) on top of a first value written by a first concurrent transaction, and the first value is lost to other transactions running concurrently which need, by their precedence, to read the first value. The transactions that have read the wrong value end with incorrect results. The dirty read problem: Transactions read a value written by a transaction that has been later aborted. This value disappears from the database upon abort, and should not have been read by any transaction ("dirty read"). The reading transactions end with incorrect results. The incorrect summary problem: While one transaction takes a summary over the values of all the instances of a repeated data-item, a second transaction updates some instances of that data-item. The resulting summary does not reflect a correct result for any (usually needed for correctness) precedence order between the two transactions (if one is executed before the other), but rather some random result, depending on the timing of the updates, and whether certain update results have been included in the summary or not. Most high-performance transactional systems need to run transactions concurrently to meet their performance requirements. Thus, without concurrency control such systems can neither provide correct results nor maintain their databases consistently. === Concurrency control mechanisms === ==== Categories ==== The main categories of concurrency control mechanis
Gonioreflectometer
A gonioreflectometer is a device for measuring a bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). The device consists of a light source illuminating the material to be measured and a sensor that captures light reflected from that material. The light source should be able to illuminate and the sensor should be able to capture data from a hemisphere around the target. The hemispherical rotation dimensions of the sensor and light source are the four dimensions of the BRDF. The 'gonio' part of the word refers to the device's ability to measure at different angles. Several similar devices have been built and used to capture data for similar functions. Most of these devices use a camera instead of the light intensity-measuring sensor to capture a two-dimensional sample of the target. Examples include: a spatial gonioreflectometer for capturing the SBRDF (McAllister, 2002). a camera gantry for capturing the light field (Levoy and Hanrahan, 1996). an unnamed device for capturing the bidirectional texture function (Dana et al., 1999).
Topincs
Topincs is a software for rapid development of web databases and web applications. It is based on LAMP and the semantic technology Topic Maps. A Topincs web database makes information accessible through browsing very much like a Wiki. Editing a page on a subject is done through forms rather than markup editing. A web database can be tailored into a web application to provide specific user groups a contextualized approach to the data. All modeling and development tasks are performed in the web browser. No other development tools are necessary. The server requires Apache, MySQL and PHP. The client works on any standards-compliant web browser on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. The layout is automatically adjusted to smaller screens. The programmatic access to data is done via a virtual object-oriented programming interface which is set up over the schema in a few minutes. It is interpreted rather than generated. Portions of the database can be pulled into memory to accelerate bulk access. == Features == Browseable data High-quality web forms Little to no programming Development done in the browser, no other tools required Client runs in any standard-compliant web browser Virtual object-oriented programming interface User interface adjusts to screen size Supports desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones Flexible data modeling == Challenges == Requires rethinking the development process and dropping many hard learned habits Requires a familiarity with two ISO standards ISO 13259 and 19756 Forms cannot be easily adjusted in layout and behavior Server installation difficult and prone to error == License == Topincs can be used in a private network for any purpose for free. The use in a public network is restricted to non-commercial applications.
Human Race Machine
The Human Race Machine (HRM) is a computerized console composed of four different programs. The Human Race Machine program allows participants to see themselves with the facial characteristics of six different races: Asian, White, African, Middle Eastern, and Indian, mapped onto their own face. The Age Machine allows viewers see an aged version of his or her face. A version of this methodology has been used for over twenty years by the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to help locate kidnap victims and missing children. The Couples Machine combines photographs of two people in different percentages to show the appearance of their child. The Anomaly Machine lets viewers see themselves with facial anomalies. The HRM was created by artist Nancy Burson and David Kramlich; it uses morphing technology. It was shown on Oprah on 2006-02-16.