Tag Archives: Climbing
#436190 What Is the Uncanny Valley?
Have you ever encountered a lifelike humanoid robot or a realistic computer-generated face that seem a bit off or unsettling, though you can’t quite explain why?
Take for instance AVA, one of the “digital humans” created by New Zealand tech startup Soul Machines as an on-screen avatar for Autodesk. Watching a lifelike digital being such as AVA can be both fascinating and disconcerting. AVA expresses empathy through her demeanor and movements: slightly raised brows, a tilt of the head, a nod.
By meticulously rendering every lash and line in its avatars, Soul Machines aimed to create a digital human that is virtually undistinguishable from a real one. But to many, rather than looking natural, AVA actually looks creepy. There’s something about it being almost human but not quite that can make people uneasy.
Like AVA, many other ultra-realistic avatars, androids, and animated characters appear stuck in a disturbing in-between world: They are so lifelike and yet they are not “right.” This void of strangeness is known as the uncanny valley.
Uncanny Valley: Definition and History
The uncanny valley is a concept first introduced in the 1970s by Masahiro Mori, then a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The term describes Mori’s observation that as robots appear more humanlike, they become more appealing—but only up to a certain point. Upon reaching the uncanny valley, our affinity descends into a feeling of strangeness, a sense of unease, and a tendency to be scared or freaked out.
Image: Masahiro Mori
The uncanny valley as depicted in Masahiro Mori’s original graph: As a robot’s human likeness [horizontal axis] increases, our affinity towards the robot [vertical axis] increases too, but only up to a certain point. For some lifelike robots, our response to them plunges, and they appear repulsive or creepy. That’s the uncanny valley.
In his seminal essay for Japanese journal Energy, Mori wrote:
I have noticed that, in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny valley.
Later in the essay, Mori describes the uncanny valley by using an example—the first prosthetic hands:
One might say that the prosthetic hand has achieved a degree of resemblance to the human form, perhaps on a par with false teeth. However, when we realize the hand, which at first site looked real, is in fact artificial, we experience an eerie sensation. For example, we could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness. When this happens, we lose our sense of affinity, and the hand becomes uncanny.
In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, Mori explained how he came up with the idea for the uncanny valley:
“Since I was a child, I have never liked looking at wax figures. They looked somewhat creepy to me. At that time, electronic prosthetic hands were being developed, and they triggered in me the same kind of sensation. These experiences had made me start thinking about robots in general, which led me to write that essay. The uncanny valley was my intuition. It was one of my ideas.”
Uncanny Valley Examples
To better illustrate how the uncanny valley works, here are some examples of the phenomenon. Prepare to be freaked out.
1. Telenoid
Photo: Hiroshi Ishiguro/Osaka University/ATR
Taking the top spot in the “creepiest” rankings of IEEE Spectrum’s Robots Guide, Telenoid is a robotic communication device designed by Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro. Its bald head, lifeless face, and lack of limbs make it seem more alien than human.
2. Diego-san
Photo: Andrew Oh/Javier Movellan/Calit2
Engineers and roboticists at the University of California San Diego’s Machine Perception Lab developed this robot baby to help parents better communicate with their infants. At 1.2 meters (4 feet) tall and weighing 30 kilograms (66 pounds), Diego-san is a big baby—bigger than an average 1-year-old child.
“Even though the facial expression is sophisticated and intuitive in this infant robot, I still perceive a false smile when I’m expecting the baby to appear happy,” says Angela Tinwell, a senior lecturer at the University of Bolton in the U.K. and author of The Uncanny Valley in Games and Animation. “This, along with a lack of detail in the eyes and forehead, can make the baby appear vacant and creepy, so I would want to avoid those ‘dead eyes’ rather than interacting with Diego-san.”
3. Geminoid HI
Photo: Osaka University/ATR/Kokoro
Another one of Ishiguro’s creations, Geminoid HI is his android replica. He even took hair from his own scalp to put onto his robot twin. Ishiguro says he created Geminoid HI to better understand what it means to be human.
4. Sophia
Photo: Mikhail Tereshchenko/TASS/Getty Images
Designed by David Hanson of Hanson Robotics, Sophia is one of the most famous humanoid robots. Like Soul Machines’ AVA, Sophia displays a range of emotional expressions and is equipped with natural language processing capabilities.
5. Anthropomorphized felines
The uncanny valley doesn’t only happen with robots that adopt a human form. The 2019 live-action versions of the animated film The Lion King and the musical Cats brought the uncanny valley to the forefront of pop culture. To some fans, the photorealistic computer animations of talking lions and singing cats that mimic human movements were just creepy.
Are you feeling that eerie sensation yet?
Uncanny Valley: Science or Pseudoscience?
Despite our continued fascination with the uncanny valley, its validity as a scientific concept is highly debated. The uncanny valley wasn’t actually proposed as a scientific concept, yet has often been criticized in that light.
Mori himself said in his IEEE Spectrum interview that he didn’t explore the concept from a rigorous scientific perspective but as more of a guideline for robot designers:
Pointing out the existence of the uncanny valley was more of a piece of advice from me to people who design robots rather than a scientific statement.
Karl MacDorman, an associate professor of human-computer interaction at Indiana University who has long studied the uncanny valley, interprets the classic graph not as expressing Mori’s theory but as a heuristic for learning the concept and organizing observations.
“I believe his theory is instead expressed by his examples, which show that a mismatch in the human likeness of appearance and touch or appearance and motion can elicit a feeling of eeriness,” MacDorman says. “In my own experiments, I have consistently reproduced this effect within and across sense modalities. For example, a mismatch in the human realism of the features of a face heightens eeriness; a robot with a human voice or a human with a robotic voice is eerie.”
How to Avoid the Uncanny Valley
Unless you intend to create creepy characters or evoke a feeling of unease, you can follow certain design principles to avoid the uncanny valley. “The effect can be reduced by not creating robots or computer-animated characters that combine features on different sides of a boundary—for example, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, or real and artificial,” MacDorman says.
To make a robot or avatar more realistic and move it beyond the valley, Tinwell says to ensure that a character’s facial expressions match its emotive tones of speech, and that its body movements are responsive and reflect its hypothetical emotional state. Special attention must also be paid to facial elements such as the forehead, eyes, and mouth, which depict the complexities of emotion and thought. “The mouth must be modeled and animated correctly so the character doesn’t appear aggressive or portray a ‘false smile’ when they should be genuinely happy,” she says.
For Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the goal is not to avoid the uncanny valley, but to avoid bad character animations or behaviors, stressing the importance of matching the appearance of a robot with its ability. “We’re trained to spot even the slightest divergence from ‘normal’ human movements or behavior,” he says. “Hence, we often fail in creating highly realistic, humanlike characters.”
But he warns that the uncanny valley appears to be more of an uncanny cliff. “We find the likability to increase and then crash once robots become humanlike,” he says. “But we have never observed them ever coming out of the valley. You fall off and that’s it.” Continue reading
#436126 Quantum Computing Gets a Boost From AI ...
Illustration: Greg Mably
Anyone of a certain age who has even a passing interest in computers will remember the remarkable breakthrough that IBM made in 1997 when its Deep Blue chess-playing computer defeated Garry Kasparov, then the world chess champion. Computer scientists passed another such milestone in March 2016, when DeepMind (a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company) announced that its AlphaGo program had defeated world-champion player Lee Sedol in the game of Go, a board game that had vexed AI researchers for decades. Recently, DeepMind’s algorithms have also bested human players in the computer games StarCraft IIand Quake Arena III.
Some believe that the cognitive capacities of machines will overtake those of human beings in many spheres within a few decades. Others are more cautious and point out that our inability to understand the source of our own cognitive powers presents a daunting hurdle. How can we make thinking machines if we don’t fully understand our own thought processes?
Citizen science, which enlists masses of people to tackle research problems, holds promise here, in no small part because it can be used effectively to explore the boundary between human and artificial intelligence.
Some citizen-science projects ask the public to collect data from their surroundings (as eButterfly does for butterflies) or to monitor delicate ecosystems (as Eye on the Reef does for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef). Other projects rely on online platforms on which people help to categorize obscure phenomena in the night sky (Zooniverse) or add to the understanding of the structure of proteins (Foldit). Typically, people can contribute to such projects without any prior knowledge of the subject. Their fundamental cognitive skills, like the ability to quickly recognize patterns, are sufficient.
In order to design and develop video games that can allow citizen scientists to tackle scientific problems in a variety of fields, professor and group leader Jacob Sherson founded ScienceAtHome (SAH), at Aarhus University, in Denmark. The group began by considering topics in quantum physics, but today SAH hosts games covering other areas of physics, math, psychology, cognitive science, and behavioral economics. We at SAH search for innovative solutions to real research challenges while providing insight into how people think, both alone and when working in groups.
It is computationally intractable to completely map out a higher-dimensional landscape: It is called the curse of high dimensionality, and it plagues many optimization problems.
We believe that the design of new AI algorithms would benefit greatly from a better understanding of how people solve problems. This surmise has led us to establish the Center for Hybrid Intelligence within SAH, which tries to combine human and artificial intelligence, taking advantage of the particular strengths of each. The center’s focus is on the gamification of scientific research problems and the development of interfaces that allow people to understand and work together with AI.
Our first game, Quantum Moves, was inspired by our group’s research into quantum computers. Such computers can in principle solve certain problems that would take a classical computer billions of years. Quantum computers could challenge current cryptographic protocols, aid in the design of new materials, and give insight into natural processes that require an exact solution of the equations of quantum mechanics—something normal computers are inherently bad at doing.
One candidate system for building such a computer would capture individual atoms by “freezing” them, as it were, in the interference pattern produced when a laser beam is reflected back on itself. The captured atoms can thus be organized like eggs in a carton, forming a periodic crystal of atoms and light. Using these atoms to perform quantum calculations requires that we use tightly focused laser beams, called optical tweezers, to transport the atoms from site to site in the light crystal. This is a tricky business because individual atoms do not behave like particles; instead, they resemble a wavelike liquid governed by the laws of quantum mechanics.
In Quantum Moves, a player manipulates a touch screen or mouse to move a simulated laser tweezer and pick up a trapped atom, represented by a liquidlike substance in a bowl. Then the player must bring the atom back to the tweezer’s initial position while trying to minimize the sloshing of the liquid. Such sloshing would increase the energy of the atom and ultimately introduce errors into the operations of the quantum computer. Therefore, at the end of a move, the liquid should be at a complete standstill.
To understand how people and computers might approach such a task differently, you need to know something about how computerized optimization algorithms work. The countless ways of moving a glass of water without spilling may be regarded as constituting a “solution landscape.” One solution is represented by a single point in that landscape, and the height of that point represents the quality of the solution—how smoothly and quickly the glass of water was moved. This landscape might resemble a mountain range, where the top of each mountain represents a local optimum and where the challenge is to find the highest peak in the range—the global optimum.
Illustration: Greg Mably
Researchers must compromise between searching the landscape for taller mountains (“exploration”) and climbing to the top of the nearest mountain (“exploitation”). Making such a trade-off may seem easy when exploring an actual physical landscape: Merely hike around a bit to get at least the general lay of the land before surveying in greater detail what seems to be the tallest peak. But because each possible way of changing the solution defines a new dimension, a realistic problem can have thousands of dimensions. It is computationally intractable to completely map out such a higher-dimensional landscape. We call this the curse of high dimensionality, and it plagues many optimization problems.
Although algorithms are wonderfully efficient at crawling to the top of a given mountain, finding good ways of searching through the broader landscape poses quite a challenge, one that is at the forefront of AI research into such control problems. The conventional approach is to come up with clever ways of reducing the search space, either through insights generated by researchers or with machine-learning algorithms trained on large data sets.
At SAH, we attacked certain quantum-optimization problems by turning them into a game. Our goal was not to show that people can beat computers in this arena but rather to understand the process of generating insights into such problems. We addressed two core questions: whether allowing players to explore the infinite space of possibilities will help them find good solutions and whether we can learn something by studying their behavior.
Today, more than 250,000 people have played Quantum Moves, and to our surprise, they did in fact search the space of possible moves differently from the algorithm we had put to the task. Specifically, we found that although players could not solve the optimization problem on their own, they were good at searching the broad landscape. The computer algorithms could then take those rough ideas and refine them.
Herbert A. Simon said that “solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.” Apparently, that’s what our games can do with their novel user interfaces.
Perhaps even more interesting was our discovery that players had two distinct ways of solving the problem, each with a clear physical interpretation. One set of players started by placing the tweezer close to the atom while keeping a barrier between the atom trap and the tweezer. In classical physics, a barrier is an impenetrable obstacle, but because the atom liquid is a quantum-mechanical object, it can tunnel through the barrier into the tweezer, after which the player simply moved the tweezer to the target area. Another set of players moved the tweezer directly into the atom trap, picked up the atom liquid, and brought it back. We called these two strategies the “tunneling” and “shoveling” strategies, respectively.
Such clear strategies are extremely valuable because they are very difficult to obtain directly from an optimization algorithm. Involving humans in the optimization loop can thus help us gain insight into the underlying physical phenomena that are at play, knowledge that may then be transferred to other types of problems.
Quantum Moves raised several obvious issues. First, because generating an exceptional solution required further computer-based optimization, players were unable to get immediate feedback to help them improve their scores, and this often left them feeling frustrated. Second, we had tested this approach on only one scientific challenge with a clear classical analogue, that of the sloshing liquid. We wanted to know whether such gamification could be applied more generally, to a variety of scientific challenges that do not offer such immediately applicable visual analogies.
We address these two concerns in Quantum Moves 2. Here, the player first generates a number of candidate solutions by playing the original game. Then the player chooses which solutions to optimize using a built-in algorithm. As the algorithm improves a player’s solution, it modifies the solution path—the movement of the tweezer—to represent the optimized solution. Guided by this feedback, players can then improve their strategy, come up with a new solution, and iteratively feed it back into this process. This gameplay provides high-level heuristics and adds human intuition to the algorithm. The person and the machine work in tandem—a step toward true hybrid intelligence.
In parallel with the development of Quantum Moves 2, we also studied how people collaboratively solve complex problems. To that end, we opened our atomic physics laboratory to the general public—virtually. We let people from around the world dictate the experiments we would run to see if they would find ways to improve the results we were getting. What results? That’s a little tricky to explain, so we need to pause for a moment and provide a little background on the relevant physics.
One of the essential steps in building the quantum computer along the lines described above is to create the coldest state of matter in the universe, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. Here millions of atoms oscillate in synchrony to form a wavelike substance, one of the largest purely quantum phenomena known. To create this ultracool state of matter, researchers typically use a combination of laser light and magnetic fields. There is no familiar physical analogy between such a strange state of matter and the phenomena of everyday life.
The result we were seeking in our lab was to create as much of this enigmatic substance as was possible given the equipment available. The sequence of steps to accomplish that was unknown. We hoped that gamification could help to solve this problem, even though it had no classical analogy to present to game players.
Images: ScienceAtHome
Fun and Games: The
Quantum Moves game evolved over time, from a relatively crude early version [top] to its current form [second from top] and then a major revision,
Quantum Moves 2 [third from top].
Skill Lab: Science Detective games [bottom] test players’ cognitive skills.
In October 2016, we released a game that, for two weeks, guided how we created Bose-Einstein condensates in our laboratory. By manipulating simple curves in the game interface, players generated experimental sequences for us to use in producing these condensates—and they did so without needing to know anything about the underlying physics. A player would generate such a solution, and a few minutes later we would run the sequence in our laboratory. The number of ultracold atoms in the resulting Bose-Einstein condensate was measured and fed back to the player as a score. Players could then decide either to try to improve their previous solution or to copy and modify other players’ solutions. About 600 people from all over the world participated, submitting 7,577 solutions in total. Many of them yielded bigger condensates than we had previously produced in the lab.
So this exercise succeeded in achieving our primary goal, but it also allowed us to learn something about human behavior. We learned, for example, that players behave differently based on where they sit on the leaderboard. High-performing players make small changes to their successful solutions (exploitation), while poorly performing players are willing to make more dramatic changes (exploration). As a collective, the players nicely balance exploration and exploitation. How they do so provides valuable inspiration to researchers trying to understand human problem solving in social science as well as to those designing new AI algorithms.
How could mere amateurs outperform experienced experimental physicists? The players certainly weren’t better at physics than the experts—but they could do better because of the way in which the problem was posed. By turning the research challenge into a game, we gave players the chance to explore solutions that had previously required complex programming to study. Indeed, even expert experimentalists improved their solutions dramatically by using this interface.
Insight into why that’s possible can probably be found in the words of the late economics Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon: “Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent [PDF].” Apparently, that’s what our games can do with their novel user interfaces. We believe that such interfaces might be a key to using human creativity to solve other complex research problems.
Eventually, we’d like to get a better understanding of why this kind of gamification works as well as it does. A first step would be to collect more data on what the players do while they are playing. But even with massive amounts of data, detecting the subtle patterns underlying human intuition is an overwhelming challenge. To advance, we need a deeper insight into the cognition of the individual players.
As a step forward toward this goal, ScienceAtHome created Skill Lab: Science Detective, a suite of minigames exploring visuospatial reasoning, response inhibition, reaction times, and other basic cognitive skills. Then we compare players’ performance in the games with how well these same people did on established psychological tests of those abilities. The point is to allow players to assess their own cognitive strengths and weaknesses while donating their data for further public research.
In the fall of 2018 we launched a prototype of this large-scale profiling in collaboration with the Danish Broadcasting Corp. Since then more than 20,000 people have participated, and in part because of the publicity granted by the public-service channel, participation has been very evenly distributed across ages and by gender. Such broad appeal is rare in social science, where the test population is typically drawn from a very narrow demographic, such as college students.
Never before has such a large academic experiment in human cognition been conducted. We expect to gain new insights into many things, among them how combinations of cognitive abilities sharpen or decline with age, what characteristics may be used to prescreen for mental illnesses, and how to optimize the building of teams in our work lives.
And so what started as a fun exercise in the weird world of quantum mechanics has now become an exercise in understanding the nuances of what makes us human. While we still seek to understand atoms, we can now aspire to understand people’s minds as well.
This article appears in the November 2019 print issue as “A Man-Machine Mind Meld for Quantum Computing.”
About the Authors
Ottó Elíasson, Carrie Weidner, Janet Rafner, and Shaeema Zaman Ahmed work with the ScienceAtHome project at Aarhus University in Denmark. Continue reading