We present a new challenge to examine whether large language models understand social norms. In contrast to existing datasets, our dataset requires a fundamental understanding of social norms to solve. Our dataset features the largest set of social norm skills, consisting of 402 skills and 12,383 questions covering a wide set of social norms ranging from opinions and arguments to culture and laws. We design our dataset according to the K-12 curriculum. This enables the direct comparison of the social understanding of large language models to humans, more specifically, elementary students. While prior work generates nearly random accuracy on our benchmark, recent large language models such as GPT3.5-Turbo and LLaMA2-Chat are able to improve the performance significantly, only slightly below human performance. We then propose a multi-agent framework based on large language models to improve the models' ability to understand social norms. This method further improves large language models to be on par with humans. Given the increasing adoption of large language models in real-world applications, our finding is particularly important and presents a unique direction for future improvements.

Bad news for those who struggle with anxiety, get too competitive, or simply choke under pressure: new research suggests that you may have to stay at home on Earth while other, more laid back and'agreeable' types colonize Mars. The new study, which is still undergoing peer review, ran computer simulations tracking the progress of human settlements on the Red Planet through their first 28 years of virtual operation. 'Agreeable personality types were assessed to be the most enduring for the long term,' the researchers found, across all four of the personality types used in their simulations, 'whereas neurotics showed least adaptation capacity.' The researchers also discovered that the minimum number of settlers needed to successfully operate a human colony on Mars was much lower than previously expected: just 22 people. 'Contrary to other literature,' they wrote of their simulated Martian colonies, 'the minimum number of people with all personality types that can lead to a sustainable settlement is in the tens and not hundreds.'

Establishing a human settlement on Mars is an incredibly complex engineering problem. The inhospitable nature of the Martian environment requires any habitat to be largely self-sustaining. Beyond mining a few basic minerals and water, the colonizers will be dependent on Earth resupply and replenishment of necessities via technological means, i.e., splitting Martian water into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel. Beyond the technical and engineering challenges, future colonists will also face psychological and human behavior challenges. Our goal is to better understand the behavioral and psychological interactions of future Martian colonists through an Agent-Based Modeling (ABM simulation) approach. We seek to identify areas of consideration for planning a colony as well as propose a minimum initial population size required to create a stable colony. Accounting for engineering and technological limitations, we draw on research regarding high performing teams in isolated and high stress environments (ex: submarines, Arctic exploration, ISS, war) to include the 4 basic personality types within the ABM. Interactions between agents with different psychological profiles are modeled at the individual level, while global events such as accidents or delays in Earth resupply affect the colony as a whole. From our multiple simulations and scenarios (up to 28 Earth years), we found that an initial population of 22 was the minimum required to maintain a viable colony size over the long run. We also found that the agreeable personality type was the one more likely to survive. We find, contrary to other literature, that the minimum number of people with all personality types that can lead to a sustainable settlement is in the tens and not hundreds.

Embedded in the narrative DNA of the new Netflix movie Stowaway is one of the most iconic and controversial science-fiction short stories ever published, "The Cold Equations," by Tom Godwin. Like "The Cold Equations," Stowaway is the story of a spaceship journey that hits a snag when an additional passenger is discovered onboard. The ship can't complete its trip with the extra drain on its resources, so somebody has to go out the airlock. "The Cold Equations" first appeared in the August 1954 edition of Astounding magazine, whose editor, John W. Campbell Jr., played a major role in defining the genre of "hard science fiction"--that is, stories fundamentally concerned with the accurate depiction of science and technology. According to legend, Campbell sent the story back to Godwin several times because the author kept trying to find a way for the characters to wriggle out of the story's central dilemma and achieve a happy ending.

NASA's Artemis program will mark a significant milestone in US space flight history when it lifts off in late 2024. Not only will it be the first time that American astronauts have travelled further than LEO since the 1970s, and not only will it be the first opportunity for a female astronaut to step foot on the moon. The Artemis mission will perform the crucial groundwork needed for humanity to further explore and potentially colonize our nearest celestial neighbor as well as eventually serve as a jumping-off point in our quest to reach Mars. Given how inhospitable space is to human physiology and psychology, however, NASA and its partners will face a significant challenge in keeping their lunar colonists alive and well. Back in the Apollo mission era, the notion of constructing even a semi-permanent presence on the surface of the moon was laughable -- largely because the numerous lunar regolith samples collected and returned to Earth during that period were "found to be dry as a bone," Rob Mueller, Senior Technologist in Advanced Projects Development at NASA said during a SXSW 2021 panel.

The Mayflower is taking to the water in Plymouth harbor. It's not the ship that left this southwest England port 400 years ago carrying Pilgrim settlers to America. The sleek vessel being readied Tuesday for its official launch has no passengers, no crew -- but like its predecessor, an ambitious mission. The 50-foot (15-meter) trimaran has "no one on board, no captain, no place to eat, no place to sleep," said Brett Phaneuf, co-director of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship project. The ship is set to follow in its forebear's footsteps by crossing the Atlantic from Plymouth, England, to Plymouth, Massachusetts, this time on a marine research trip.

Open access to high-quality education is limited by the difficulty of providing student feedback. In this paper, we present Generative Grading with Neural Approximate Parsing (GG-NAP): a novel approach for providing feedback at scale that is capable of both accurately grading student work while also providing verifiability--a property where the model is able to substantiate its claims with a provable certificate. Our approach uses generative descriptions of student cognition, written as probabilistic programs, to synthesise millions of labelled example solutions to a problem; it then trains inference networks to approximately parse real student solutions according to these generative models. We achieve feedback prediction accuracy comparable to professional human experts in a variety of settings: short-answer questions, programs with graphical output, block-based programming, and short Java programs. In a real classroom, we ran an experiment where humans used GG-NAP to grade, yielding doubled grading accuracy while halving grading time.

American inventor and billionaire Elon Musk believes that the first colonists of Mars may be artificial intelligence. On Thursday, the CEO of SpaceX said that the probability that the first resident of Mars would be artificial superintelligence. According to the Mask, the probability of this is reached in his calculations 30%. SpaceX is working on an ambitious schedule of sending two spaceships to Mars by 2022, paving the way for four more vehicles in 2024, two of which will be the first people on Mars. Musk said in November that the Mars colony can be formed in the next seven to ten years, which means that it may appear in 2025.

American inventor and billionaire Elon Musk believes that the first colonists of Mars may be artificial intelligence.

This week's IRL heads to the theater, where the latest Marvel flick is setting box-office records. Find out how several of our editors felt about it (spoiler-free, although we can't guarantee anything about the comments section below), as well as our thoughts on a few new series from Netflix, Hulu and HBO. It's been quite a while since I watched the original Lost in Space, but something tells me its weird mashup of sixties-style drama and campy sci-fi doesn't hold up too well. When I was a kid devouring as many reruns of the show as possible, I identified with Robbie the Robot, because, well, we had the same name. In the current reboot of the show, currently streaming on Netflix, I connect more with the parents.