What’s Next — a Silicon Shakespeare?

From HAL to Blade Runner to The Terminator, the concept of a “thinking” computer has long been a fantasy (and a fear) of modern man.

As we enter the new millennium, there are still no androids walking among us (at least that we know of). Nonetheless, enormous strides have been made recently in the development of artificial intelligence. One of which is happening here at Rensselaer.

Write Here, Write Now
Perhaps the most basic tenet of human intelligence — the thing that got us out of the trees and up the food chain — is our ability to create. For instance, mankind has an exclusive on the art of storytelling: speaking, writing, developing characters and plots out of sheer imagination. As recently as a few years ago, the notion of a computer that could generate its own fiction was, well, science fiction. Not any more. Enter Brutus.1.

Two Parts Poe, One Part Jackie Collins
Dubbed “Brutus.1” because all of its stories are based on the themes of deception, evil, and betrayal, this artificial author was programmed to create its own fiction. The culmination of a project that began in 1991 at Rensselaer, Brutus.1 is the world’s most advanced story generator — able to autonomously craft stories of up to 500 words out of its own “mind.” It was featured in MIT’s Technology Review in the cover story “Chess Is Too Easy.”

So What About “Brutus.53”?
If Brutus.1 can already write short stories, what can we expect from Brutus’s descendants? Almost anything. Artificial agents will play a crucial role in entertainment, for instance, where games, books, and movies will become increasingly interactive. There is plenty of debate, however, over whether a machine will ever be able to duplicate the human mind’s ability to tell a story — because machines cannot understand feelings and experiences. Not yet.

Minds and Machines
Brutus is just one project that bends students’ brains in Rensselaer’s breakthrough Minds and Machines program. Minds and Machines is a combination of computer science, philosophy, and psychology that tackles questions about how to make computers smarter — and how computers make people smarter. We do it in a state-of-the-art Minds and Machines laboratory that gives students the tools to study the ins and outs of new technologies, tackle philosophical issues such as the changing role of computers in society — and even build their own robots. Show and tell in this classroom is a very cool thing.

But Minds and Machines is far from all. Creative thinking — the melding of multiple fields of study — is a hallmark of Rensselaer. We foster cross-disciplinary programs like no other university in the world. Because solving real-world challenges is our mission and our passion.

Why not change the world?