The core of "Spore" is its creature editor, which Wright says gives players the ability to build creatures in minutes that in the past would have taken professional game designers a couple of days.

Spore will start you out in the Tidal Pool Phase as a tiny single celled organism in the sea and will then progress as you fight for survival and evolve becoming a sea creature and eventually crawling onto land; There are many ways to accomplish this as the game lets you achieve your goals socially, by force or by culture; your choice of omnivore, carnivore or herbivore is just one example. After crawling onto the land in the next, Creature Phase, you must hunt with your creature and develop ties with others of your kind while interacting with other creatures of varying species. When you progress to the tribal phase, instead of controlling an individual creature, you are now caring for an entire tribe. Give them tools and guide their interactions as you upgrade their state of existence. The Civilization Phase gives you the goal of conquering your planet through peace and diplomacy or through war. Once you have conquered your planet you progress to the Space Phase where your flying saucer is your main tool that you use to fly around the galaxy, completing missions, attacking other great civilizations, move on to other worlds in your solar system, make contact, colonize, or terraform, then venture further to find other solar systems. A 'mission' structure provides new goals in your quest for galactic dominance.

At the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Wright explained that for him and his Spore colleagues, the game is akin to a very elaborate Montessori toy. He said that because of the scientific theories it is based it is in fact an elaborate philosophy tool. "You walk away thinking about the meaning of life," he said. "How did we get here?"

Wright also showed how artificial societies in Spore can be quickly turned into representations of human behavior. For example, by dropping a monolith into a populated area, he created a religious icon, and local creatures quickly began worshipping the monolith.

Wright used the rest of the demo to showcase Spore's cool features, included the ability to change climates, such as quickly raising the temperature of an area on a planet so seas recede or even disappear altogether. Essentially, he argued, Spore can give players a toy version of evolution. As a designer, Wright built his reputation around "software toys" — games that cannot be won or lost. 

After the Spore demo, Wright talked about how computers can expand our imaginations and become powerful tools for self-expression. He also talked about how every once in awhile, the world goes through major paradigm shifts. That's happening more frequently than in the past, in part because of political issues, in part environmental issues. See the Robin Williams video below for a "live" demo!

Posted by Casey Kazan.

SPORE Video Demo

Not surprisingly, given his early imaginings of such worlds, and the work he did to inspire people to learn more about science, the Exoplanet Exploration was named in honor of Carl Sagan.

Born in 1934, Carl Sagan was an astronomer, astrochemist, author, and played a large role in popularizing astronomy, astrophysics and other natural sciences. Among his most notable achievements was his pioneering of exobiology and promoting the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, also known as SETI.

The new fellowships will award approximately $60,000 per year, for a period of up to three years, to selected postdoctoral scientists. Among the disciplines available to study are refining techniques for detecting planets in the glare of their host sun, and searching for the crucial ingredients of line on the planets that are found.

"NASA's science-driven mission portfolio, its cultivation of young talent to pursue cutting-edge research, and the decision to commit its genius to a question of transcendent cultural significance, would have thrilled Carl," said Ann Druyan, Sagan's widow and collaborator, who continues to write and produce. "That this knowledge will be pursued in his name, as he joins a triumvirate of the leading lights of 20th century astronomy, is a source of infinite pride to our family," said Druyan. "It signifies that Carl's passion to engage us all in the scientific experience, his daring curiosity and urgent concern for life on this planet, no longer eclipse his scientific achievements."

But this is not the first theme-based program that NASA is backing. The Sagan Fellowship will join NASA’s new Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship in Physics of the Cosmos and the Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cosmic Origins.

"We are investing in our nation's best and brightest in an emerging field that is tremendously inspiring to the public," said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Posted by Josh Hill. Image copyright, Kallio 2006

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/sagan-20080903.html

The key to making these observations is a technique called very long baseline interferometry, or VLBI, which links simultaneous observations from several radio telescopes that can be thousands of miles apart. The signals from these radio dishes are combined to create a “virtual” telescope with the same resolving power as a single telescope as large as the distance between the participating dishes. As a result, VLBI can reveal exquisitely sharp details.

The cosmic target of the observations was the source known as Sagittarius A* (“A-star”), long thought to mark the position of a black hole whose mass is 4 million times that of the sun. Though Sagittarius A* was discovered three decades ago, the new observations for the first time have an angular resolution, or ability to observe small details, that is matched to the size of the black hole “event horizon” — the region inside of which nothing, including light, can ever escape.

The concept of black holes, objects so dense that their gravitational pull prevents anything including light itself from ever escaping their grasp, has long been hypothesized, but their existence has not yet been proved conclusively. Astronomers study black holes by detecting the light emitted by matter that heats up as it is pulled closer to the event horizon. By measuring the size of this glowing region at the Milky Way center, the new observations have revealed the highest density yet for the concentration of matter at the center of our galaxy, which “is important new evidence supporting the existence of black holes,” said Sheperd Doeleman of MIT, lead author of the study that will be published in the Sept. 4 issue of the journal Nature.

“This technique gives us an unmatched view of the region near the Milky Way’s central black hole,” Doeleman said. “The new observations have a resolution equivalent to being able to see, from Earth, a baseball on the surface of the moon.”

However, the team doesn’t have any actual images of the black hole—at least not yet.

“We don't have any images unfortunately,” Doeleman told The Daily Galaxy. “The VLBI experiment we did was capable of getting a size of SgrA*, but not its exact shape.”

But Doeleman says that getting actual visual images is now a possibility. 

“Now that we have shown that VLBI can detect the source, we can add more telescopes so that we can aim towards making images in the future.” Doelman explained to the Daily Galaxy.  “I note that even with the VLBI data we have, we can start to constrain models that people have made of how SgrA* radiates.

Though it takes light more than 25,000 years to reach us from the center of the Milky Way, the team measured the size of Sagittarius A* to be only one-third the Earth-sun distance — a trip that light would make in only three minutes. The astronomers concluded that the source of the radiation likely originates in either a disk of matter swirling in toward the black hole, or a high-speed jet of matter being ejected by the black hole. “Future observations that create even larger virtual telescopes will be able to pinpoint exactly what makes Sagittarius A* light up,” Doeleman said. “Most galaxies are now thought to have black holes at their centers, but because Sagittarius A* is in our own galaxy, it is our best chance to observe what’s happening at an event horizon.”

“This pioneering paper demonstrates that such observations are feasible,” commented theorist Avi Loeb of Harvard University, who was not a member of the discovery team. “It opens up a new window for probing the structure of space and time near a black hole and testing Einstein’s theory of gravity.”

Posted by  Rebecca Sato

* Potions of this post are extracts from an MIT News Office release written by David Chandler.

However British Computer Society President and ECS Professor of Artificial Intelligence Nigel Shadbolt, believes differently.

Shadbolt believes that the future of artificial intelligence will be much different, though no less exciting, than previously expected.  “AI has had a huge influence on the past and present of computer science – it will be a large part of the future but not in the way you might think."

According to the AI expert from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, the difference between the Hollywood style intelligence and what we are seeing evolve around us comes in many forms. For example, it is seen in the computers that can beat chess champions, robotic vacuums like the Roomba, and in the immense power being exhibited by the internet.

Instead of intelligence that is a “brain in a box”, we are seeing intelligence that is assistive, adaptive and flexible. They are helping us “drive our cars, diagnose disease and provide opponents in computer games.” In other words, instead of an intelligence that is “…agonizing about their existence or whether we are about to switch them off” we are seeing the growth of intelligence that, in years to come, will immerse us and center around humans, rather than feel the need to enslave humans.

“There will be micro-intelligences all around us – systems that are very good and adaptive at particular tasks, and we will be immersed in environments stuffed full of helpful devices.”

He takes his theory further, all the way in to the tubes of the internet. In collaboration with Professor Tim Berners-Lee – the co-inventor of the World Wide Web – the pair have been investigating the next generation Web. “What is emerging now is a digital ecosystem,’ says Professor Shadbolt, ‘involving lots of simple systems which connect millions of complex ones – humans!”

And there begins to be a certain amount of logic and a lessening of the fear I feel for the day when I am some robots whipping boy. We see such developments already in websites such as Facebook and Flickr, and programs such as Google Earth and World of Warcraft. We are being linked together, ever so slowly by a collective conscience.

Such a collective conscience, or intelligence, is self-evident in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as well. Shadbolt describes Wikipedia as “…the communal expression of a great deal of our encyclopedic knowledge…” As a result, the web will be smart because of humans, not of itself. It is our collective intelligence that is providing the intelligence we feared robots would develop on their own.

Shadbolt suggests that“You don’t need to worry about the robot next door deciding to make a bid for world domination!”

Posted by Josh Hill.

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/about/news/1418