Patrick wows the judges with artificial
Thursday January 15 2004
A computer whizz kid from Dromineer has finished second overall in the National ESAT/ BT Young Scientists competition held in the RDS in Dublin last week.
Patrick Collison wowed the judges to take the runner-up spot with an artificial intelligence he created on a computer programme.Though only 15, Patrick, a Junior Certificate student at Castletroy College, beat stiff competition from more senior entrants among the total nationwide entry of 482 projects.
Education Minister Noel Dempsey presented Patrick with a perpetual trophy and a cheque for ?750 at the awards presentation held on Friday night last.
Impressively, Patrick came up with the idea to create a cyberspace-based artificial intelligence himself and saw the project through to completion without help from teachers or computer professionals.
Such was Patrick’s relationship with the artificial intelligence that it became almost humanised. Its creator gave it a sex – male – and “christened” him Isaac.
“I created a computer programme that allowed it to learn. It could learn things from people. For example it became language independent. It could learn languages like French or German,” says Patrick.
By simply clicking a few keys on his computer Patrick communicated with Isaac in a chatroom on the internet. The key to his project was to set Isaac the task of passing the standard Turing artificial intelligence test, devised by British scientist Alan Turing in 1950.
“He did pass the test in certain instances for a while,” says Patrick, who had to learn a special programme language (LISP) in order to create the cyberspace artificial intelligence.
Patrick, a computer buff to his toenails, started his project in April last year and worked on it up to the days leading up to the competition. For him, working on the project was tantamount to the joy experienced by the proverbial pig in muck. He has loved computers since he got his first one at the age of nine.
“I watch virtually no tv,” he admitted. “All my screen time is computer time for me. When I’m not doing that I’m reading or talking to my friends who I got to know through computers.”
An ideal day spent for Patrick would be attending a LAN (Local Area Network) Party, which to the uninitiated is an event where computer enthusiasts get together for glorious hours spent playing computer games and engaging in other computer pursuits.
In the RDS to witness Patrick being presented with his prize by the Minister Dempsey were his proud parents, Denis and Lily and his two younger brothers, John and Tommie.
With an achievement as prestigious as this the young Dromineer lad has managed to add a real gloss to his curriculum vitae. But the world of work is still quite a few years away for Patrick, who is not sure what he wants to do yet, but he is big into maths, science, and, needless to say, computers.
As for Isaac, what now? “I think I will maybe still make a few modifications and release him on the internet.”
Report: pgleeson@nenaghguardian.ie
