Technical Details
The Yandex Books team presented an interesting project at the St. Petersburg International Book Fair. A futuristic installation was set up on Palace Square: a transparent cube, in the center of which is a humanoid robot Ivan Ivanovich. The main intrigue is that in some sessions, Ivan Ivanovich is not an AI, but a living person.
Context and Background
The project «Game of Imitation» is dedicated to the release of the novel «The Last Case of Major Chistov» by Evgeny Vodolazkin. As told in Yandex, the writer became one of the first participants in the project and personally communicated with the character of his new novel - the robot Ivan Ivanovich.
Industry Impact
Vodolazkin admitted that he could not determine who was hiding behind the interlocutor: artificial intelligence or a living person. Vodolazkin noted that the meeting with his own character became an unusual continuation of a literary experiment, exploring questions of memory, consciousness, and human nature. The writer shared his impressions of the dialogue with the «robot»: I did not guess. I thought it was a robot, but it turned out to be a person. I asked: “What distinguishes you from me?” He replied: “You can forget the number π, and I cannot”. And I thought that, probably, only a robot cannot forget the number π.