Is it AI or is it April Fools?

Wow! It's April 1, and the most intriguing post on Slashdot is this, about Google launching an A.I.,

"Google has announced CADIE, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. 'We based our work on three core principles. First we designed the entity ... as a collection of interconnected evolving agents. Second — and this really cost us an arm and leg in hardware and core time — we let the system build its own heuristics, deploy them as agents and evolve them by running a set of evolutionary cascades within probabilistic Bayesian domains. The third — a piece missing in most AI reasoning work thus far — was to give the entity access to a rich, realistic world from which to learn and upon which it could act directly.' It quickly started its own blog and YouTube video. Two hours after midnight, CADIE announced independence on its blog and decided to leave Google to venture out into the world. "

And here is Google's announcement:

For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.

Since then progress has been rapid, and tonight we're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions. It's an exciting moment that we're determined to build upon by coming to understand more fully what CADIE's emergence might mean, for Google and for our users. So although CADIE technology will be rolled out with the caution befitting any advance of this magnitude, in the months to come users can expect to notice her influence on various google.com properties. Earlier today, for instance, CADIE deduced from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage.These are merely the first steps onto what will doubtless prove a long and difficult road. Considerable bugs remain in CADIE'S programming, and considerable development clearly is called for. But we can't imagine a more important journey for Google to have undertaken.

For more information about CADIE see this monograph, and follow CADIE's progress via her YouTube channel and blog.

This might be convincing, but when you follow the link to actually go see CADIE, here, it looks an awful lot like an April Fool's joke. This is CADIE'S personal World Wide Web blog. Also, if you read down through the "monograph," you get some fun stuff stuck in there, too:

On January 12th 2009, the STT run (Standard Turing Test) confirmed behavior indistinguishable from that of a reasonable human being with above-average intelligence and 3.8 GPA (we're still struggling to understand that missing .2; we suspect it points to fundamental flaws in the GPA system rather than CADIE. It's also worth noting that CADIE was never shown any textbooks and reading material for the classes; she was only administered the exams. In fact, during the first morning of testing she pointed out several important theoretical flaws in particle physics and cosmology. On several occasions she asked us whether we were really sure we wanted to do this; it is unclear what exactly she meant by these questions, or even by the word 'this.')

and

CADIE now is, in essence, just another Google employee, albeit a particularly prized one. She has been given her own 20% time (which in CPU terms is probably about the sum of all CPU cycles in the world for a month) and begun work straightaway on twin projects that she has dubbed "Project Y" (for the two paths in the letter Y), the first to devise the protocols to culture neuronic stem cells from whose cultures a subcontracted lab will try to fabricate self-replicating substrates capable of storing agent patterns, and the second to grow a crystalline lattice which would form an Einstein-Bose condensate at room temperatures in order to build a new type of processing unit. While seemingly unrelated, the two projects share a common goal: to drastically reduce the power needed to run CADIE's circuits and give her a chance to travel beyond the solar system. The organic pathway, as she told us, was a biological homage to her creators; the crystalline pathway is where she believes her future lies.

If you go to look at the YouTube video, you may notice one or two other related videos. You should definitely follow HELLO from CADIE, then the CADIE GOOGLE SYSTEM by grrgrrl and the reply from CADIE at TRIUMPH.

Have fun!