Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

Entertainment and Sports. 
In an amusing and intriguing application of GAs, Oxford scientist Torsten Reil created 
animated creatures with simulated joints and muscles and a neural net for a brain. He then assigned them a task: to 
walk. He used a GA to evolve this capability, which involved seven hundred parameters. "If you look at that system 
with your human eyes, there's no way you can do it on your own, because the system is just too complex," Reil points 
out. "That's where evolution comes in."
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While some of the evolved creatures walked in a smooth and convincing way, the research demonstrated a well-
known attribute of GAs: you get what you ask for. Some creatures figured out novel new ways of passing for walking. 

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According to Reil, "We got some creatures that didn't walk at all, but had these very strange ways of moving forward: 
crawling or doing somersaults." 
Software is being developed that can automatically extract excerpts from a video of a sports game that show the 
more important plays.
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A team at Trinity College in Dublin is working on table-based games like pool, in which 
software tracks the location of each ball and is programmed to identify when a significant shot has been made. A team 
at the University of Florence is working on soccer. This software tracks the location of each player and can determine 
the type of play being made (such as free kicking or attempting a goal), when a goal is achieved, when a penalty is 
earned, and other key events. 
The Digital Biology Interest Group at University College in London is designing Formula One race cars by 
breeding them using GAs.
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The AI winter is long since over. We are well into the spring of narrow AI. Most of the examples above were 
research projects just ten to fifteen years ago. If all the AI systems in the world suddenly stopped functioning, our 
economic infrastructure would grind to a halt. Your bank would cease doing business. Most transportation would be 
crippled. Most communications would fail. This was not the case a decade ago. Of course, our AI systems are not 
smart enough—yet—to organize such a conspiracy.