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The colour of smell
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News & Comment
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.12 December 2001
In Brief
Robots help humans defeat robots The web portal Yahoo had a problem: it was infested by cyber-bots. Easily passing themselves off as humans, these programs would log on to its chat rooms, sending out numerous ‘personal’ messages to convince users to go to their company’s website – a form of illicit but free and very effective advertising. Other robots can skew the results of on-line polls or cheat on web contests, by participating thousands of times, much more often than could any human. In order to prevent computer programs from using systems designed for human use, a way of distinguishing between human and automaton web agents is needed – but, because of the high volume of traffic on some websites, this test would need to be administered and scored by computers! A group of researchers at the Aladdin Center at Carnegie-Mellon University has come up with such a test, which they call a CAPTCHA (‘Completely Automatic PublicTuringTest to tell Computers and Humans Apart’; see http://www.captcha.net/).The test is based on the robust human ability to recognize visual shapes, in the presence of distortion or noise, an ability currently unequaled by any known computer program. Currently, anyone applying for an account atYahoo has to prove that he or she is human by typing in a word presented with noise and distortion (see examples below). Real humans (generally) pass the test, while robots are kept out – but for how long…? MW
Hand-waving insight into infant language Vocal ‘babbling’ is universally observed in healthy babies but its meaning is unclear. http://tics.trends.com
Laura Ann Petitto and colleagues at McGill University recorded hand movements of hearing babies born to deaf parents as a means of separating out two possible hypotheses on the meaning of babbling [Nature 413, 35–36].The ‘motor hypothesis’ holds that babbling simply results from non-linguistic opening and closing of the jaw.The ‘linguistic hypothesis’ states that babbling reflects babies’ sensitivity to specific rhythmic patterns present in all languages, and their ability to use these patterns. Petitto and colleagues studied six hearing children born to deaf parents, half of whom were exposed to spoken language and half of whom were exposed only to sign language. Sign-exposed babies produced a particular class of movements, considered to be silent babbling, that were not seen in the speech-exposed babies.These movements were slow, rhythmic, and generated within a circumscribed space in front of the body. This suggests that silent babbling is not simply a motor activity (which would be the same for both groups of babies). According to Petitto, ‘this dramatic distinction between the two types of hand movements could only have occurred if babies find it important and make use of the rhythmic patterns underlying human language.’ HJB
Evolution in the sky Evolution by natural selection is Nature’s optimization technique. Owing to genetic variation in populations, optimization proceeds in a parallel, rather than a serial, fashion.The advantages of this method have long been recognized in computer science and artificial intelligence, where genetic algorithms simulate the evolution of ‘populations’ of solutions to a problem, with both ‘sexual reproduction’ and ‘mutations’ leading to new solutions whose survival depends on their fitness. Now, genetic algorithms have been successfully applied to two aerospace problems. Géraud Granger and his colleagues at CENA, the Center for Aerial Navigation Studies in Toulouse, France, have applied genetic algorithms to air traffic control.Their program, simulated on actual air traffic data, finds optimal solutions that keep planes from coming too close to each other, whilst at the same time minimizing deviations from the planes’ original trajectories. And at Purdue University, William Crossley and Edwin Williams have
applied a genetic algorithm to the complex problem of planning low satellite orbits in order for the group of satellites to cover as much territory as possible. In some cases, the solutions that they have evolved reduce gaps in coverage by 25% – which has surprised satellite engineers. MW
The colour of smell
Photograph courtesy of Scott Bauer, USDA.
When an expert wine taster describes a wine as rich in chocolate aromas, with a hint of tobacco and undertones of prune, it is likely that they are describing a particularly fullsome red. But new research shows that similar descriptions can be elicited for a white wine that is simply coloured red [G. Morrot et al. (2001) Brain Lang. (in press)]. First, the researchers used sophisticated lexical analysis to examine thousands of comments from expert wine testers. Words used to describe the odours of red wines tended to represent dark objects (e.g. coal, raspberry, chocolate), whereas words used for white wines mainly represented yellow or clear objects (e.g. honey, lemon, butter). Next, the researchers asked French winetesting students to describe the odours of wines using words from the experts’ lists. Like the experts, students chose words representing dark objects to describe reds, and light objects to describe whites. However, when they were then given a white wine coloured red they described the odour of the wine using words previously used for red wines.This intriguing finding suggests that the perception of the odour of a wine is strongly influenced by visual information, and demonstrates that multisensory inputs are integrated even when subjects are focussing on a single sensory modality. HJB
In Brief articles written by Heidi Johansen-Berg and Mark Wexler.
1364-6613/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
News & Comment
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.12 December 2001
In Brief
Robots help humans defeat robots The web portal Yahoo had a problem: it was infested by cyber-bots. Easily passing themselves off as humans, these programs would log on to its chat rooms, sending out numerous ‘personal’ messages to convince users to go to their company’s website – a form of illicit but free and very effective advertising. Other robots can skew the results of on-line polls or cheat on web contests, by participating thousands of times, much more often than could any human. In order to prevent computer programs from using systems designed for human use, a way of distinguishing between human and automaton web agents is needed – but, because of the high volume of traffic on some websites, this test would need to be administered and scored by computers! A group of researchers at the Aladdin Center at Carnegie-Mellon University has come up with such a test, which they call a CAPTCHA (‘Completely Automatic PublicTuringTest to tell Computers and Humans Apart’; see http://www.captcha.net/).The test is based on the robust human ability to recognize visual shapes, in the presence of distortion or noise, an ability currently unequaled by any known computer program. Currently, anyone applying for an account atYahoo has to prove that he or she is human by typing in a word presented with noise and distortion (see examples below). Real humans (generally) pass the test, while robots are kept out – but for how long…? MW
Hand-waving insight into infant language Vocal ‘babbling’ is universally observed in healthy babies but its meaning is unclear. http://tics.trends.com
Laura Ann Petitto and colleagues at McGill University recorded hand movements of hearing babies born to deaf parents as a means of separating out two possible hypotheses on the meaning of babbling [Nature 413, 35–36].The ‘motor hypothesis’ holds that babbling simply results from non-linguistic opening and closing of the jaw.The ‘linguistic hypothesis’ states that babbling reflects babies’ sensitivity to specific rhythmic patterns present in all languages, and their ability to use these patterns. Petitto and colleagues studied six hearing children born to deaf parents, half of whom were exposed to spoken language and half of whom were exposed only to sign language. Sign-exposed babies produced a particular class of movements, considered to be silent babbling, that were not seen in the speech-exposed babies.These movements were slow, rhythmic, and generated within a circumscribed space in front of the body. This suggests that silent babbling is not simply a motor activity (which would be the same for both groups of babies). According to Petitto, ‘this dramatic distinction between the two types of hand movements could only have occurred if babies find it important and make use of the rhythmic patterns underlying human language.’ HJB
Evolution in the sky Evolution by natural selection is Nature’s optimization technique. Owing to genetic variation in populations, optimization proceeds in a parallel, rather than a serial, fashion.The advantages of this method have long been recognized in computer science and artificial intelligence, where genetic algorithms simulate the evolution of ‘populations’ of solutions to a problem, with both ‘sexual reproduction’ and ‘mutations’ leading to new solutions whose survival depends on their fitness. Now, genetic algorithms have been successfully applied to two aerospace problems. Géraud Granger and his colleagues at CENA, the Center for Aerial Navigation Studies in Toulouse, France, have applied genetic algorithms to air traffic control.Their program, simulated on actual air traffic data, finds optimal solutions that keep planes from coming too close to each other, whilst at the same time minimizing deviations from the planes’ original trajectories. And at Purdue University, William Crossley and Edwin Williams have
applied a genetic algorithm to the complex problem of planning low satellite orbits in order for the group of satellites to cover as much territory as possible. In some cases, the solutions that they have evolved reduce gaps in coverage by 25% – which has surprised satellite engineers. MW
The colour of smell
Photograph courtesy of Scott Bauer, USDA.
When an expert wine taster describes a wine as rich in chocolate aromas, with a hint of tobacco and undertones of prune, it is likely that they are describing a particularly fullsome red. But new research shows that similar descriptions can be elicited for a white wine that is simply coloured red [G. Morrot et al. (2001) Brain Lang. (in press)]. First, the researchers used sophisticated lexical analysis to examine thousands of comments from expert wine testers. Words used to describe the odours of red wines tended to represent dark objects (e.g. coal, raspberry, chocolate), whereas words used for white wines mainly represented yellow or clear objects (e.g. honey, lemon, butter). Next, the researchers asked French winetesting students to describe the odours of wines using words from the experts’ lists. Like the experts, students chose words representing dark objects to describe reds, and light objects to describe whites. However, when they were then given a white wine coloured red they described the odour of the wine using words previously used for red wines.This intriguing finding suggests that the perception of the odour of a wine is strongly influenced by visual information, and demonstrates that multisensory inputs are integrated even when subjects are focussing on a single sensory modality. HJB
In Brief articles written by Heidi Johansen-Berg and Mark Wexler.
1364-6613/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.