Engineering eye... March 2016

News, rumours and gossip from the world of engineering

The Royal Bank of Scotland recently ran a competition for the public to decide the new face of the Scottish £10 note – the person suggested had to be a “true giant of Scottish science”. Eye was glad to see engineer Thomas Telford reach the top three nominations. However, it was Mary Somerville (1780-1872), scientist and science writer, who topped the poll and is set to become the new face of the bank’s polymer £10 notes in 2017. Telford supporters were disappointed. One civil engineer told the local press it was down to a case of mistaken heritage, adding: “He built terrific bridges, but everyone think’s he’s from Birmingham.”

Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates have warned of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. While some may take the warnings with a pinch of salt, scientists have hit on a novel way to prevent the rise of psychotic robots – get them to read children’s stories. Researchers Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison, from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believe that training robots to read stories could teach them appropriate ways to behave in human societies. The Quixote project aims to align a robot’s goals with a human’s by giving the machine a ‘reward signal’ if it acts like a protagonist in a story, instead of randomly or like the antagonist. Let’s hope Lord of the Flies or The Silence of the Lambs don’t make it onto the robot reading list.

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