ESP Biography

In 1997, chess world champion Gary Kasparov lost a series of chess games against the most unexpected of opponents: a computer. IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer to ever defeat a world champion in chess, cementing the power of artificial intelligence. 19 years later history would be repeated, as professional Go player Lee Sedol lost against Google's AlphaGo artificial intelligence. How do computers manage to keep beating the best human players? In this course we will explore the algorithms and clever tricks used in artificial intelligence to gain the upper hand on human opponents, from MinMax and Monte Carlo to Neural Networks and beyond!

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. These are the three famous laws of robotics created by Isaac Asimov for his book “I, Robot”, meant to explore how one might try and program a robot to be “ethical”. Many other movies and books have tackled the subject of Artificial Intelligence, often exploring the morality of creating computers whose intelligence rivals our own. However, thanks to modern advancements in A.I., unanswered ethical questions once limited to the realm of science fiction are starting to have relevance in the real world. If a self driving car crashes, who is to blame? Should we so readily allow robots to replace people's jobs? Should we use A.I. to predict who is most likely to commit a crime? We will discuss these questions and more as we survey the ethical issues of modern and future A.I., and try to come up with our own laws of robotics in the process.