I agree, but the good news is that game dev advances fast. So, my plan with the AGI Preschool would be to build it in an open platform such as OpenSim, and then swap in better and better physics engines as they become available.
Some current robot simulators use ODE and this seems to be good enough to handle a lot of useful robot-object and object-object interactions, though I agree it's limited. Still, making a dramatically better physics engine -- while a bunch harder than making a nice AGI preschool using current virtual worlds and physics engines -- is still a way, way easier problem than making a highly functional (in terms of sensors and actuators) humanoid robot. Also, the advantages of working in a virtual rather than physical world should not be overlooked. The ability to run tests over and over again, to freely vary parameters and so forth, is pretty nice ... also the ability to run 1000s of tests in parallel without paying humongous bucks for a fleet of robots... ben On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Derek Zahn <derekz...@msn.com> wrote: > > Oh, and because I am interested in the potential of high-fidelity physical > simulation as a basis for AI research, I did spend some time recently > looking into options. Unfortunately the results, from my perspective, were > disappointing. > > The common open-source physics libraries like ODE, Newton, and so on, have > marginal feature sets and frankly cannot scale very well performance-wise. > Once I even did a little application whose purpose was to see whether a > human being could learn to control an ankle joint to compensate for an > impulse event and stabilize a simple body model (that is, to make it not > fall over) by applying torques to the ankle. I was curious to see (through > introspection) how humans learn to act as process controllers. > http://happyrobots.com/anklegame.zip for anybody bored enough to care. It > wasn't a very good test of the question so I didn't really get a > satisfactory answer. I did discover, though, that a game built around more > appealing cases of the player learning to control physics-inspired processes > could be quite absorbing. > > Beyond that, the most promising avenue seems to be physics libraries tied > to "graphics" hardware being worked on by the hardware companies to help > sell their stream processors. The best example is Nvidia, who bought PhysX > and ported it to their latest cards, giving a huge performance boost. Intel > has bought Havok and I can only imagine that they are planning on using that > as the interface to some Larrabee-based physics engine. I'm sure that ATI > is working on something similar for their newer (very impressive) stream > processing cards. > > At this stage, though, despite some interesting features and leaping > performance, it is still not possible to do things like get realistic sensor > maps for a simulated soft hand/arm, and complex object modifications like > bending and breaking are barely dreamed of in those frameworks. Complex > multi-body interactions (like realistic behavior when dropping or otherwise > playing with a ring of keys or realistic baby toys) have a long ways to go. > > Basically, I fear those of us who are interested in this are just waiting > to ride the game development coattails and it will be a few years at least > until performance that even begins to interest me will be available. > > Just my opinions on the situation. > > ------------------------------ > *agi* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/> | > Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;>Your Subscription > <http://www.listbox.com> > -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org "I intend to live forever, or die trying." -- Groucho Marx ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
