Intelligent Machine Post:
Dogbots, Deep Crack, and fonix.

Dateline: July 19, 1998

Sony Dogbot
According to Business Week of July 20, 1998, Sony's "D21 lab" has developed a robotic dog with a 64-bit CPU, 8 megs of RAM, and a video eye. The dog can see and obey hand-signal commands, and its head and limbs can be replaced with different ones. The limbs have their own CPU and motors. According to Toshitada Doi, head of the D21 lab, you can look for it on toy store shelves in the year 2000.

I visited Sony's web site for more info, but it's not to be found as of this writing.

Deep Crack
It took a team of researchers led by John Gilmore and Paul Kocher, and financed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a mere three days to crack the U.S. government's Data Encryption Standard code (D.E.S.) using a US$250,000 homemade supercomputer ("Deep Crack"). Deep Crack ran through 17,902,806,669,197,312 keys, or about 25% of all possible combinations. Cryptography consultant Bruce Schneier said (New York Times  July 17, 1998): "The real news here is how long the Government has been denying that these machines were possible."

I dunno if it's true the government has been denying that cheap supercomputers are possible, but it's certainly the case that government will find itself less and less able to control proliferating, ever more powerful, and ever more intelligent, machines.

The Fuss at fonix
I've mentioned fonix several times, as a dark horse in the automatic speech recognition business. Judging by a recent press release, the company is beginning to add some meat to the hype. Here's ane excerpt:
 

fonix corporation (Nasdaq: FONX) reported today that its recent Annual Meeting of Shareowners on July 14, 1998 marked an important successful milestone in the Company's goal to be the leading human-computer interface technology company.  fonix and some of their collaboration partners presented a comprehensive picture for how humans can work more effectively with computers through such rapidly evolving technologies as speech recognition, intelligent agents, high quality text to speech, and handwriting recognition.

In addition to fonix Chairman and CEO, presenters at the meeting included John Oberteuffer, Ph.D. vice president of technology for fonix, as well as Professor Ron Cole, director of the Oregon Graduate Institute's Center for Spoken Language Understanding and advisor to fonix.  fonix provided live, real-time demonstrations of certain elements of the fonix core technologies including the voice-activated answering machine currently under contractual development for Siemens AG.  In addition recently acquired AcuVoice and some of fonix' collaboration partners demonstrated their technology at the meeting, including 3D Planet, Papyrus Associates, and Articulate Systems.

Professor Cole said, "I came to fonix as a skeptic, wondering how this company in Salt Lake City, Utah could possibly compete with the established players in the field.  After being quoted in the media as saying that fonix must be naive to say they could do what they were saying they would do, I accepted an invitation to visit fonix.  Needless to say, I am now working with fonix, so that my students could work with what I believe to be the future leader in human-computer interface."  He added, "The company that owns and controls interface technologies, controls the portals of the information age.  I believe that fonix will be that company."

  Until next week, 

NEXT WEEK: Probably another issue of IMP.

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