The annual Royal Institution Christmas Lectures are back tonight with the first of three episodes on ‘The Truth About AI‘ given by Prof Mike Wooldridge.
Tonight (Boxing Day, Tue 26 December), 8pm, BBC Four: Find out How To Build An Intelligent Machine
Watch on your television, or any computer / laptop via browser: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/live/bbcfour <– note that this link will show you whatever is currently being broadcast on BBC Four, at 8pm that will be the first of the Christmas Lectures.
The second and third lectures will be broadcast tomorrow and Thursday at 8pm on BBC Four too. They’ll also be available on iPlayer.
The three lectures were given live in front of an audience of young people at the Royal Institution in London’s Piccadilly in mid-December and recorded by the BBC for broadcast. Those in the audience got their tickets through the annual ticket-ballot (find out how to apply to be in the audience for next year).
About the first episode
“Professor Mike Wooldridge asks: what is artificial intelligence? He compares how AI works and learns with how the human brain functions.
Exploring the roots of AI, Mike reveals how Alan Turing devised the Imitation Game – a test of whether a machine answering a series of questions could pass as a human. The audience in the lecture theatre play a real-life version of the game to find out if AI can pass this test today.
In this lecture, Mike examines real-life neurons in action and explains how artificial neural networks are inspired by neural structures in the brain. To demonstrate how AI learns, we watch drones as they are trained to recognise and fly through structures in the lecture theatre autonomously.
AI exploded into the public consciousness in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT and boasts around 100 million monthly users. Mike unravels the mystery of how large language models like ChatGPT work, and he finds out if one day this technology – along with a whole suite of different AI tools – will allow us to understand the animals we share this planet with.
The Christmas Lectures are the most prestigious event in the Royal Institution calendar, dating from 1825, when Michael Faraday founded the series. They are the world’s longest running science television series and always promise to inspire and amaze each year through explosive demonstrations and interactive experiments with the live theatre audience.”
– text from the BBC / Ri.
EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.
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