Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences at the Department for Continuing Education

"Mathematics: Navigating Nature's Dark Labyrinth" - the Inaugural Lecture of the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, 2009.

Mathematics: Navigating Nature's Dark Labyrinth

Mathematics in the real world

Luc Steels delivers the 2012 Simonyi lecture and asks can machines be creative enough to invent their own language? Professor Steels talks about some of his recent breakthrough experiments which have seen robots programmed to play language games and come up with novel concepts, words and meanings. He discusses how this triggers a process of cultural evolution that leads to more complex forms of language and deliberate on what this tells us about the nature of our own intelligence and the future of artificial intelligence.   Luc Steels is ICREA Research Professor at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona and Director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris.   The Simonyi Lecture is funded by a generous gift from the Amalur Foundation.

Can robots be made creative enough to invent their own language?

Inspired by Évariste Galois's attempts to express symmetry using mathematical equations, Professor Marcus du Sautoy explores the inextricable link between the physical world and mathematics.