How did Japan turn science fiction into reality? Company puts the first flying bike for sale

On October 27, 2021, Japanese company ALI Technologies launched a flying bike worth $680,000, the BBC website revealed.

The Japanese company launched its Xturismo bike, which can fly for 40 minutes, at a speed of up to 100 kilometers per hour on a single electric charge. The company aims to manufacture 200 flying bikes by mid-2022.

"Until now, the choice has been to move on the ground or fly in the sky at a great height," said the company's CEO, Daisuke Katano. He added that the company hopes "to offer a new way of locomotion (flying close to the ground)".

Katano hopes rescue teams will use his company's new bicycles to reach inaccessible areas, but current laws prohibit flying bicycles from flying over Japan's busy roads.

While Ben Gardner, of Britain's Pinsent Masons, emphasized that (flying) vehicles that once seemed like a distant future, are becoming increasingly tangible every year. "Ultimately, there is scope for us to see flying vehicles spread across Britain," he said.

And Other News

Artificial intelligence beats humans in mind games

Artificial intelligence is similar to human intelligence in terms of its ability to learn through play, but it is superior to it in terms of time.

In the middle of 2019, the artificial intelligence program "Pluribus" played with 5 professional poker players in the game "Texas Holdem - No Limit", which is the most popular form of poker worldwide. Pleuribus beat them all, and it was the first time that an AI succeeded in beating the best professional human players, in a complex 6-player game.

Bluebus was developed in cooperation between Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University in the United States.

Poker is considered one of the most difficult games, and it differs radically from a game such as chess, as the opponent's cards remain closed, and there is no perfect single move, but sometimes it may require maneuvers that suggest that the player has cards other than those he actually owns. Poker belongs to the category of “missing information” games, and therefore there is no accurate strategy that stems from the analysis of all possible movements of the opponent, hence its importance as it resembles many of the actual world situations, and therefore its technologies can have many practical uses, such as product pricing and self-guided cars Driving during busy traffic. On this occasion, the title of the cover of the August 30, 2019 issue of "Science" magazine read, "Artificial intelligence succeeds in deception and masters the game of multiplayer poker."

World chess champion Garry Kasparov rests his head in his hands as he is seen on a monitor during game six of the chess match against IBM supercomputer Deep Blue , May 11, 1997. The supercomputer made chess history Sunday when it defeated Kasparov for an overall victory In their six game re-match, the first time a computer has triumphed over a reigning world champion in a classical match.

The last stop of the human mind

The superiority of the computer over the human in mind games dates back to 1997 after it managed to defeat the world chess champion.

When IBM began developing a computer capable of playing chess professionally, then-world chess champion Gary Kasparov declared, "No computer can beat me." But in 1997 the supercomputer "IBM" called "Deep Blue" managed to defeat it. This was the first defeat of the human brain against a machine in a complex game, where the total number of possibilities in one match is 1 and to the right of it 123 zeros (the average number of moves per game for each side is 37). The cover title of Newsweek magazine, May 5, 1997, was "The Last Stand of the Human Mind."

Watson on the line

Not only did IBM develop an automated system that defeats the world chess champion, but it followed that up by developing another system with the aim of defeating the champions of cultural games. In 2011, artificial intelligence grabbed the headlines when IBM's Watson computer beat two contestants on the popular Jeopardy TV show, especially one contestant, Ken Kennings. He held the record for the number of victories in this program (74 consecutive victories).

It took 5 years for Watson to prepare for this assignment, including 4 years to learn English, a year to read and memorize everything published on Wikipedia, and a few thousand other books. The Saudi MBC network had prepared and presented an Arabic version of that program under the name "The Touch".

Casino, online gambling, technology and people concept - close up of poker player with playing cards, laptop and chips at green casino table.  top view.

Google is on the line

In 2017, the AlphaGo program - built on artificial intelligence and designed by Google's DeepMind company - beat world champion KJ in the Chinese game of Go. "Gu" is an ancient and very complex Chinese game, which is similar to chess, but it is more difficult for computers, as the total number of possibilities in it is 1 and to the right of it 360 zeros (the average number of moves in one game is 150), that is, more than the number of atoms known universe.

From learning by training with data to learning by training with self-rules

AlphaGo defeated the world champion after training on hundreds of thousands of human game data.

And the new version, "AlphaGo Zero", did not use any human data. After providing the program with the rules of the game, he trained himself by playing millions of matches with himself, and within a few days of training, he crushed the original "AlphaGo" program.

This breakthrough in AI technology was made by the DeepMind team. “By not using human data or human expertise, we have already removed the limitations that AI had to use human knowledge,” says David Silver, Principal Investigator at DeepMind and Professor at University College London. “AI is now able to create knowledge itself from First Principles.

Is artificial intelligence superior to humans?

To answer this question, we must distinguish between the two types of artificial intelligence. Where "Artificial Intelligence" and its acronym "AI" are divided into two types; "Artificial General Intelligence" (AGI), and "Artificial Narrow Intelligence" (ANI).

When a computer can learn a single mental task (such as playing chess), this is called finite artificial intelligence (ANI), and general artificial intelligence (AGI). It means that the computer has the ability to learn any mental task that a person can perform at a level no less than his own. Some people who are interested in this regard add a third type, "Artificial Super Intelligence" and its acronym "ASI", although its birth was not expected several decades ago.

Still, the best test for machine intelligence is the Turing Test, which was invented by the English mathematician Alan Turing in 1950. Three isolated computers are used in this test. The first is operated by a human who asks a set of pre-prepared questions, the second is used by a human to answer the questions, and the third is used by a computer program prepared to answer the same questions. The computer assigned to answer this test passes successfully, if the questioner cannot determine whether the answer he obtained was provided by the computer or by the human being. Alan Turing says, "A computer deserves to be called intelligent if it can deceive a human being into thinking that he is a human being and not a machine."

It is worth noting that the term "artificial intelligence" was coined by the American computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956 when he invited a group of researchers from diverse disciplines to a summer workshop to discuss machine thinking.

According to the types of intelligence referred to, we are still in the stage of limited artificial intelligence, so when is machine intelligence expected to reach the level of human intelligence?

Raymond Kurzweil, an American computer scientist, says, "The year 2029 is the appropriate date in which I expect artificial intelligence to pass the Turing Test, and thus achieve human levels of intelligence," but most expert opinion polls indicate that this may happen between 2040 and 2050.