As if robots weren't terrifying enough, a Japanese technology firm has created a humanoid machine capable of thinking and learning by itself.
The new robot, dubbed SOINN (Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network), was developed by the Hasegawa Group at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Unlike other robots, it will attempt to perform tasks it hasn't encountered before and learn from any mistakes it makes.
In other words, it is capable of retaining past experiences and knowledge, allowing it to make educated decisions during future assignments.
The robot's sensory information draws from visual, auditory, and tactile data. Eventually, it will also be able to access information online and communicate with other robots to broaden its knowledge and skills set.
"Thinking about artificial intelligence in the real world, actual environments are inevitably more complex, and they change quickly," explains one of the inventors, Osamu Hasegawa.
"So it's necessary to have a learning mechanism that adapts to the situation. Also, because new situations emerge, it's also necessary to have the ability to keep learning new information on the spot. As an algorithm for achieving that, we've created SOINN. SOINN is very light on computation, and it can learn while eliminating noise from the new information that comes in."
At present, the tasks SOINN can perform are pretty simple fare, such as pouring a glass of water and adding ice cubes to make it cool. We imagine it's only a short matter of time before it finds the means to build a robot army.
Check out the video below to see SOINN in action:
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