News/Research

Ken Goldberg in The Question of Intelligence

24 Feb, 2020

Ken Goldberg in The Question of Intelligence

Ken Goldberg and his team's robotic artwork, "AlphaGarden," appears at The New School's art exhibition. The Question of Intelligence will run until April 8, and features a range of works by artists who explore what consistutes intelligence and if/how it can be constructed by algorithms and machines.

(Fun fact: the exhibition is being curated by Christiane Paul, one of our upcoming ATC speakers discussing Art & AI on April 16.)

AlphaGarden poses the simple question: can a robot learn to garden? Considering natural versus artificial intelligence, it invites viewers to reflect the natural world and our own roles within it.

From the project description:

AlphaGarden does not assume the garden will flourish. The robot will struggle. It will over-water, under-prune; plants may die; invasive species in the garden may take over. The robot is being trained with simulations that run 100,000 times faster than nature. But simulations only approximate reality. There is enormous complexity in nature, we haven’t been able to solve the three-body problem in thermodynamics and a garden has far more variables. There will always be a distance between simulation and reality. Evoking scenes from War Games and WALL-E, AlphaGarden exposes this “reality gap” with a growing garden and visually compelling display that evolves over time.

Learn more about the exhibition here!