Communication is key

摘要

When Ashutosh Saxena wants some coffee or ice cream, he can ask a robot to make it for him. Tell Me Dave (pictured) is a bot that can cook simple meals according to spoken instructions. But programming Tell Me Dave to understand even one kind of order is tricky: humans have an annoying tendency to ask for the same thing in a variety of ways, or to give one short command necessitating multiple discrete actions, So Saxena and his colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, turned to crowdsourcing to help Tell Me Dave understand these subtly complex reguests, They developed a computer game in which human players are placed in a virtual kitchen and asked to follow sample sets of instructions, much like the robot would. How they respond is used to train the algorithm that guides Tell Me Dave, so when it is later faced with commands like "boil some water" or "cook the ramen" in a real kitchen, it can come up with the appropriate actions. So far, the robot gets it right about two-thirds of the time.