Unmanned Systems Technology 007 | UMEX 2016 report | Navya ARMA | Launch & recovery systems | AIE 225CS | AUVs | Electric motors | Lethal autonomous weapons

78 networks, adjusting connections using trial-and-error-based reinforcement learning, drawing on the Google Cloud platform for computing power. Tested against other Go programs, AlphaGo won all but one of 500 games before going on to beat triple European Go champion Fan Hui in October 2015, then world champion Sodol. Holy cow! moments The success of AlphaGo might be what Prof Russell would call a ‘Holy cow! moment’, in which a computer achieves something that is either unexpected or not expected for many years. Presenting what he calls an anti-mystical version of the potential threat from AI, in a recent lecture (available on YouTube) he describes seeing video of the Big Dog robot walking steadily on four legs, mastering steep, slippery terrain and recovering easily after being pushed over as just such a moment for him. He also notes that more and more AI technologies are crossing the threshold from the lab to being useful in the real world, which he compares to a larger chess board on which machines would eventually make better moves than humans. In his own work, he says, he used AI to create a prototype system in three hours that proved able to calculate a more accurate position for North Korea’s February 12, 2013 nuclear bomb test than the UN could come up with using conventional methods that drew on 100 years of seismic research and a billion dollars of funding. He went on to cite other recent major achievements in AI, including self- driving cars, speech recognition and the ostensibly less spectacular one of automatic picture captioning. Presented with a photograph, a computer came up with a caption that accurately described it as a group of young people playing Frisbee. That suggests it recognised the fact that they were human, made a judgement about their age and discerned the activity they were engaged in, even though the Frisbee itself was only shown as a narrow white streak. This is a variety of intention inference, which is an important area of research April/May 2016 | Unmanned Systems Technology Insight | Lethal autonomous weapons The game of Go has now been mastered by Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo software, which beat the human world champion for the first time in March 2016 (Courtesy of Google DeepMind) Presented with a photograph, a computer came up with a caption that accurately described it as a group of young people playing Frisbee