04/02/2017 Click

Much to look forward to today on BBC One for the rugby, that is all the

sport for now, now it is time for Click.

sport for now, now it is time for Click.

This week, meet our youngest reporter ever.

We give a games legend something to play with.

For decades, scientists all around the world have been trying to

create a machine that can match our intelligence.

And nowadays artificially intelligent algorithms

can perform many tasks much better than us.

For a long time scientists have been the use in games like

chess, drafts and go as a benchmark for testing AI.

And that's because all these games have a certain

amount of unpredictability built into them.

But this week the AI community has been celebrating a big

win after a poker playing algorithm called Liberatus defeated four top

human players in a 20 day match of heads up no limit Texas hold 'em

I've been using poker as a benchmark for 12 years.

Now the best AI has surpassed the level of the

best humans in the strategic reasoning under imperfect

But even at this big win is only a little step towards

Intelligence one capable of sophisticated thought across a wide

spectrum of areas, and solving problems just as well as a human

It's a hard thing to think through, and

But it's, I think it's impossible to forecast accurately.

Speech has been another big challenge for AI

Personal assistants and chat bots are becoming more

sophisticated, but they so far can't fool us into thinking that they're

But what if you thought you were talking to another person?

Would that make you more likely to trust it?

Well, two researchers at the London School of

economics came up with an experiment to see if we would communicate

better with AI if its messages were delivered to us by a human.

They call this computer human hybrid the

And to explore the concept, Jane Copestick found

herself becoming an Echoborg herself.

The Echoborg was inspired by research from Stanley Milgram.

He is the Professor behind the controversial experiments on

obedience in the 1960s, to see if people would deliver

electric shocks to others if instructed to buy an

Milgram also studied body perception, to

determine if we hold preformed opinions

of other people based on

By using hidden earpieces, people could speak

someone else's thoughts through their own body.

The Echoborg has updated this research for the 21st

century, to see if people will react better to artificial intelligence.

Such as the messages from an online chat bot.

If they are being delivered by a human.

I'm in the first stages of testing this out by

I'm starting my speech shadowing practice.

The first step in becoming a fully fledged Echoborg.

The professors have told me this process

will take at least eight hours for me to get any good at it.

I'm starting my first practice with JK

Rowling's Harvard commencement speech.

Members of the Harvard Corporation and the board of

By shadowing speech, I should be able to quickly repeat

back the messages from a chat bot so people won't realise

It may seem something paradox, but there's horses in the

I did something and scuttled somewhere.

Now, to put it to the test, I'm meeting creator Professor

Alex Gillespie at the London School of Economics.

And Kevin Corti, who called in on Skype.

Kevin is using a chat bot called Rose, which is not preprogrammed.

The most noticeable problem in becoming a convincing AI are the

delays while Rose thinks of a response to the question.

I thought for a moment you might be a

Republic of Ireland and Croatia and France.

A magical place full of rain and crazy people.

What you notice, they tend to be quite

It takes each sentence as a stand-alone sentence.

Some of them will speak like they are

artificial intelligence, and some of them will pretend not to be.

But although last time I spoke to which

it said it was artificial intelligence.

Our final test for the Echoborg was to

bring it on stage in front of an audience of 700 people at the BBC

What a lot of humans find difficult...

How do I know you are human, how do you know I'm human?

In fact, some of the audience members

One thought it was a real conversation with a human, not

Some people thought you didn't want to talk about

That you were trying to avoid the question,

they really thought you were trying to avoid the questions.

Someone even said, had it been a man would it

Without becoming fully fledged Echoborgs, we are already

giving a voice to artificial intelligence everyday.

Through the algorithms guiding our news

consumption, to our shopping habits and online searches.

We're bringing AI to life more and more.

Projects like the Echoborg let us reflect on

what this means for our AI future and perhaps even what it means to be

Hello and welcome to The Week in Tech.

It was the week that Facebook lost $500 million in a lawsuit.

The case centres around the creation of

the oculus rift virtual reality headset.

The US Court ordered the payment after a jury found Facebook

owned VR outfit Oculus used computer code belonging to ZeniMax, a media

company which has a subsidiary which produces the video game Doom.

They say you shouldn't cry over spilt milk.

Online supermarket Ocado is testing a robot hand that can pack

fruits and vegetables without damaging them.

At the moment, human beings pack more fragile items, like

But it's not just fragile foodstuffs feeling the pinch

Researchers at MIT have created a claw made from

hydrogel, that can pick up a live fish without causing it any harm.

Sunday the team hopes the eellike robot can be used to help with

Next, forget the selfie stick, so 2015, it's all about the

Currently being crowd funded, the air selfie

is a portable flying camera built into a mobile phone cover.

And, as it's carried around with your mobile

phone, never miss an opportunity for Internet narcissism ever again.

If you're a fan of Metal Gear Solid, you might also be

Considered the father of the stealth game genre.

The Metal Gear franchise was a success at

least in part thanks to his leadership.

But now he's working on a new game called Death Stranding,

which he showed to the world at the E3 video games

We sent Stefan Powell, ace radio one news beat reporter,

to meet Hideo Kojima in Japan and get an exclusive tour

We're on our way to the studio now and

it's been just over a year since he left Konami

And we don't really know what he's been doing in that time.

We know a little bit about his new project,

Death Stranding, that's coming to the PlayStation

Hopefully we get to find out a little bit

glimpse into the future and what's come as well.

Before that, though, there's the traditional gift

I mean, what are you supposed to get a man

who stood in front of a cabinet full of lifetime achievement awards?

And I hear you are a bit of a Lego fan.

Kojima isn't your average game designer.

And this isn't your average office, either.

Or your average company mascot, for that

The man credited with changing the way many people approached game

design is not taking his new venture lightly.

He wants his next step is to be just as successful as his

Clearing his mind of some of the negativity of recent years.

Focusing instead on the future, new titles, new projects, and new ideas.

TRANSLATION: I worked at my previous company

for 30 years, and gained a

But technology improves, the games market and the

But what I do best, making games, does not really

change, so I'm not worried about embarking on this new journey.

The studio itself is pretty small, but

has everything Kojima and his team need to crack on with the first

The PlayStation 4 exclusive, Death Stranding.

Details about which are still top secret.

But whatever it turned out to be, he's

TRANSLATION: We want this game to be something

people can get into easily, but after they play for an hour or two

they start to notice something a little different.

It's something they haven't played before.

Whenever I create something new, some people

For example, when I first created a stealth game some people really

wanted to just fight, so they didn't really like it.

I want to create an experience that has the same effect

The building up of his own studio is also a source of

A journey that has been far more difficult than many would

This tiny room was Kojima production's first office.

Here he spent time not only designing Death

Stranding, but refining his next big idea to change gaming as we know it.

TRANSLATION: The way I see the future of

gaming, think of it as

All meshed together to create one type of

The whistle-stop tour of Tokyo continues.

Seeing the places that came between that first

tiny room and the shiny new studio housing Kojima Productions today.

It's a vision that has grown from a long love of technology.

His association with Sony so important

to the future of his new company is not something new, though.

Here at their big tech exhibition in downtown Tokyo, he explains how

technology of the past has had such a big impact on him.

He says the first Metal Gear was made on this device.

Looking back over the past raises questions of

VR is often said to be the next big thing in gaming.

Now this isn't VR like we know it now.

But for Kojima, it's not so clear-cut.

Do you think the games out there for VR at the moment are good

enough to really sort of get the audience excited?

TRANSLATION: It's easy in VR to try and do something

scary, something from a high place, something erotic.

But I think there's something beyond that.

You can give people emotions that they haven't

And can you tell us any of your ideas?

So it looks like a Kojima virtual reality

experience is not so far away, even if he will chair

experience is not so far away, even if he won't share

More proof that his appetite for making things is not on the

The most revealing thing I've found during my

time with Hideo Kojima is that still really

time with Hideo Kojima is that he's still really

passionate and enthusiastic about tech and gaming.

He's got no plans to retire any time soon.

In fact, he set himself a big challenge.

He's changed gaming once, and now he plans doing it

Playtime was never like this in my day.

I've been taking a look at some of the latest toys hoping to light

up the faces of children and grown-ups.

And, inevitably, a few of them could be found at London's toy

This looks like a drone in a cage and that's because it is.

It's also a proof of concept for a toy

that's going to be available later this year.

Its inventor here is wearing this glove, which means you

It all looks pretty simple, but I know

you've been studying robotics for 15 years,

so there's quite a bit more to this than meets the eye, isn't

Once the science of gestures has been

codified, and that's what we've been able to do,

as you can imagine, we

can bring all sorts of robotic toys out, and consumer devices.

The brain itself is in the glove, in the

And the algorithms embedded in the glove.

The drone is merely a conduit for the gestures being

There was also a clear trend towards giving kids a deeper level

of control when it comes to toy gadgets.

This is a robot that aims to help kids learn to code.

They can operate it manually through the App,

or set up sequences of the functions they'd like it to carry out.

It looks pretty raw when you've got all

these leads and buttons, so it really is giving kids a chance to

I also recently got my hands on a drone that kids can

programme, spending time tweaking code at a computer or using drag and

I had a play around with some of the drone's functions.

So maybe that shows who the real kid is.

First of all I press W, which should get the drone up and running.

This is a spot of that well-known activity, drone bowling.

Yes, the skittles are down here on the floor.

It's not just about flying, though, you

To do that, you swap the wings for wheels.

Last year we learned quite how much of an appetite there was

And give the big kids a chance for some

This gaming robot, much like virtual avatars,

It's also customisable and upgradable, with the ability to add

wheels or even take on another robot in the room.

Or if you want to get yourself moving, how about a personal

This prototype has limited functionality, but still

Not that it fought too hard when I decided I'd had enough.

Now, if you're a Cinefile, you know we

have officially entered awards season.

Yes, the red carpets, the speeches and the campaigning have

Well, this year at Click, we've decided to give those

wonderful magicians behind the camera, namely the visual

effects artists, their proper due with a

series of exclusive features on some of the most

memorable films from the

First up, a return to the wizarding world with BAFTA nominee

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Mr Scamander, do you know anything about the wizarding

The earliest Potter film I worked on was the second

Then went on to work on subsequent films for production.

The big difference, I would say, now,

doing Fantastic Beasts, for instance, was we were doing creature

design in the computer from day one.

We were animating creatures, showing David what they looked like.

And getting into a developmental study through

Just something we could never have done before so

When we decided we didn't like it we could modify it and

change it very quickly on the computer.

We would model something up, in ZBrush, then very quickly

think, that looks cool, let's stick a rig in it.

So, sticking essentially the bones in to be able

And we had quite worked up animation studies of

a lot of stuff that just didn't make the film.

We made simple models of the creatures, then brought in some

Some of them were actually, the team who did

Warhorse for instance, then we had a full-size erumpent puppet,

And they were able to use that onset.

And our guide was always what we've done in

the computer in terms of the animated previews.

It meant we could put something on set for Eddie

Redmayne to react to or perform against.

So the erumpent, 17 foot tall, 20 foot long, was able to be

onset, and everybody could see how big it

was and where she was on the

set, then we could frame the camera for her and Eddie could play against

One of the key things about this film was that you believe the

If you believe the actor, and you believe the

creature's there, that's what makes it work.

When you see an actor and the eyeline isn't right, and

the creature doesn't seem to be responding to them, you know there

The niffler, ultimately, was a fairly tough

A lot more close-up, I guess, than you would have done, for

a lot longer than you would have done a few years ago.

You look at the niffler and what makes him so

animalistic and real is all that small breathing, all the secondary

stuff, it is in the overall performance, it is all that

That we put loads of work into, that you

kind of think, God, really, do you notice?

And it's like, no, you don't notice directly, but you do notice

because we all look at human beings all the time.

You've got a pretty big price on your head, Mr

Gnarlak, our goblin, was, you know, a really

Probably the most advanced digital humanoid type character I think

I think Ron was fantastic to work with, he wore a

performance patch, a headset, so he had

17 facial markers on, doing the

facial capture meant in our post-stage we were able to deliver

That was just the pure capture applied to

It was a massive leap in shading and the technology driving

Whilst there is the animation, there are also all the

systems we've created to help drive muscles, skin,

All of that stuff's working up and up.

Every film, we're pushing evermore, trying to get to that

More Oscar hopefuls and special perfect

Follow us on Twitter throughout the week.

Thanks for watching and we'll see you soon.