6 minute read
Technology and Innovation
Uppingham pupils are always encouraged to create, conceptualise, model, draw, and sculpt. To be imaginative, pioneers, and look to the future. Three OUs have taken these principles to another level and share their stories…
AI Sailor
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Henry Arnold (F 01)
In 2019, while at McKinsey, Henry was part of a team who worked with Emirates Team New Zealand [ETNZ] to build an AI sailor – helping to design their winning America’s Cup boat. Henry, who has a background in AI and is also a keen sailor, shared a dream with some McKinsey colleagues in New York to create an America’s Cup project.
They recognised that digital simulation was at the heart of ETNZ’s victory in 2017. While ETNZ’s main rival, Oracle, were still using wind tunnels and water tanks, ETNZ designed their boat entirely through digital simulation. Their simulator is much like a computer game; three sailors jump into a purpose-built space and race the virtual boats on a virtual racecourse. This allows them to generate lap times for each design and therefore assess their relative performance. However, by the time you test across different wind conditions and, given the demands on the sailors’ time, ETNZ were only able to test one design a week.
Henry and his team proposed building an AI sailor using reinforcement learning, the same approach used by DeepMind (Google) to learn arcade games and beat the world’s topranked Go player.
ETNZ were sceptical but also fascinated by the possibility of an AI sailor. Some of the core challenges with AI and reinforcement learning are around its adaptability. The problem was testing different designs, and the McKinsey team needed to develop an approach that could adapt to those variations. The team developed novel techniques, including a concept called peer learning, to achieve the adaptability and consistency needed to measure the performance of a design to within one second per race.
In the end the AI sailor was able to beat the winning America's Cup sailors on the virtual racecourse in almost all conditions. The sailors, inspired by the AI sailor, were able to adapt their light wind tacks to improve their own performance.
ETNZ went on to win the America’s Cup for the fourth time, with a boat that was a generation ahead of their rivals and with manoeuvres from the sailors that eclipsed the rest. The project was one of the first industrial applications of reinforcement learning and highlights its huge potential to drive performance in industry.
Portal Bots
Chris Hall (B 95)
Chris Hall experienced Virtual Reality for the first time in early 2016 and was completely blown away by the experience. Recognising the incredible potential of the technology, Chris and his wife launched The Portal Winnipeg in October 2016, the region’s very first Virtual Reality Studio and only the third of its kind in all of Canada. By offering Virtual Reality in a studio environment, Chris was able to share his passion for VR with everyone, breaking down the price barrier that would normally keep people from being able to try out this new and exciting technology.
By 2017, The Portal had become so popular that expansion was necessary. They underwent a succession of moves to accommodate their growing customer base, with plans for the grand opening of their newest location set for 3rd March 2020.
But, just at that point, the pandemic shook the world, putting a firm break on all of their operations. Always on the lookout for the next big thing, however, Chris set his sights on remotecontrolled robots.
Distraught by the possibility of a never-ending line of ‘Zoom Quizzes’ as the only form of digital entertainment available, Chris set about researching a way to bring Portal Bots to the world during the pandemic. He discovered a new technology known as ‘telepresence’, which allowed people to log into the studio remotely from anywhere in North America, or even beyond. In April 2021, Portal Bots was launched, the very first telepresence-controlled robot entertainment experience available in North America.
Through state-of-the-art technology, Portal Bots allows users to connect with each other from around the US, or even as far as Europe, to battle, race, or strategize in real time. Up to 30 people can join a single game via livestream and take turns controlling the six robots in heated ‘best of’ race competitions or ‘last bot standing’ free-for-all tournaments.
Chris commented:
And, of course, Chris is still leading the way with passion and excitement, hard work and determination, and a desire to share the newest and most exciting technology with everyone.
www.theportalwpg.ca
When a Robot Writes a Play
By Tomas Studenik (M 93)
2021 marks the centenary of the word ‘robot’; it appeared for the first time in Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. which premiered in Prague in 1921. The Czech playwright depicted robots as emotionless biological machines who, in the end, obliterate all humans from the surface of the Earth. One hundred years later robots, in the form of servers and server farms, are looming above us in the clouds, munching on data, helping us and, crucially, not wiping us out.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is, however, said to pose a serious threat to mankind. Stephen Hawking famously contended that humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, would be superseded by AI. What did Hawking mean exactly? We often think about patterns, numbers and computational problems, but what about creativity and art? While you may have read about attempts of neural networks to paint, compose music, write poetry or even short stories, there has so far been no attempt for AI to write a script of a full-blown theatre play. Could it be done? Would you enjoy it? Was Hawking right?
How about celebrating one hundred years of robots by reversing the roles of the playwright and the character? Let’s have a robot write about humans. And this was exactly what I decided to do almost three years ago.
This was one of those situations where all you have is just an idea and a lot of passion. A month later, you have a chief scientist, theatre director and another 10 people on board our ship called THEaiTRE. Six months later, Technology Agency of the Czech Republic awards a grant for a two-year applied social sciences project. And a year later, the Covid pandemic puts an end to your dream of staging the first theatre play written by AI in London’s West End and in New York’s Broadway.
We did not give up on our dream. In cooperation with Švanda Theater, the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University and the Theatre faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, we kept feeding in drama texts. Since May 2020, a computer, under the supervision of a team of scientists from Charles University, has been generating script parts about the life of the main character – a robot facing everyday joy and suffering. It was fascinating to see how the robot struggled with human issues such as birth, dying, the search for love, and the coronavirus crisis. The result was a set of dialogues that tell a story about how a robot sets out on a journey through our human world.
In February 2021, we streamed the world premiere online via www. theaitre.com. Over 30,000 people watched; it was both loved and hated. So, will AI take a playwright’s job away? Stay tuned for our world tour in 2022 and find out for yourself.
