wired.com
So we are still a long way from Data and HAL.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

I remember about 20 years ago it was a hot topic in IT. We had one small project in a large bank (expensive project) running under the tag "AI" with a small, limited success and that was it. AI was overly hyped in the project.

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

P.S. at least Kurzweil is making money with AI hype...

http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1

Computer systems that memic the role of an expert in solving specific kinds of problems have been pretty successful. These expert systems have been used to diagnose medical conditions, trouble-shoot and resolve problems on the DS-1 space probe, determine the cause of operating system crashes (I worked on that one), etc. True AI as the term was meant to imply is a much more difficult problem DS-1 used a self-navigation capability that was pretty radical for the time. While under ion propulsion, you could give it the coordinates of the desired destination (such as a comet rendezvous) and DS-1 would automatically determine the best course to fly there. This was a non-trivial task because of the ion propulsion. While the force imparted by the ion engine was quite small, it had a big impact on the navigation calculations.

The cynics will tell you that artifical intelligence will never overcome natural stupidity. Perhaps the best hope for AI is Moore's Law about the power of computer systems doubling every 18-24 months.

Chess Programs are Expert Systems not AI.

__________________
Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Expert systems are included in the AI field. Heuristic searches, knowledge representation methods, emergent learning, natural language processing... these are all things that fall under the broad roof of AI. It's not just the end result, but the tools that will hopefully get us there.

Besides, chess programs are not all expert systems. I can't think of a single one that is, actually. It doesn't make much sense. The simplest ones are just heuristic searches. More complicated ones use databases as well. I've got a neural network one somewhere in the depths of my hard drive.

__________________
"It's turtles all the way down."

Every time any particular AI problem is solved, it ceases being AI.

__________________
Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

Expert systems are included in the AI field.

Well it might be possible that things are labelled a little differently in Canada, but when I was studying them about 10 years ago an Expert System wasn't consider an AI because they had not capacity to learn, they merely used search parameters to locate stored knowledge and retrieve it. It's like calling a MSAccess an AI because it can create an SQL search string based on what is entered into a form and then evaluate it and return the data to you.

__________________
Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Expert Systems usually work with a knowledge base and, to me, seem like glorified decision tables.

Well, both of the AI courses I took used American texts, and both included a good deal of information on expert systems. Besides, good expert systems typically can learn. They are quite different from databases... if they weren't, we'd just call them (you guessed it) databases. Maybe what you were studying wasn't really expert systems?

Check out the "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" outline at Berkeley, under the Comp Sci-Engineering category (http://sis.berkeley.edu/catalog/gcc_search_menu).

Expert systems are a great demonstration of the state of the art in AI. For example, some expert systems are used in tutoring applications, teaching students how to speak a language or build an engine. These systems will adapt to the way the student learns by tracking difficulties, relating them, and presenting the material in a customized way for each student. They can use fuzzy logic, heuristics, or probabilistic reasoning methods to come up with solutions to the problem of training the person.

Also, expert systems are typically interactive, while database queries are not. The best part is that they can often explain to you what they are doing. When the system queries you, you can ask "why," and only then determine whether or not the information is worth obtaining to give the system. Sometimes, you can direct the expert system to first pursue a specific course of reasoning at this point. In this respect, these programs are capable of collaborating with humans in a non-trivial way.

If that doesn't fall under the scope of AI, then nothing does.

__________________
"It's turtles all the way down."

I still don't think Expert Systems qualify as AI. In most cases, you are interviewing an expert, setting up a knowledge base using his/her answers, and then have an inference engine providing an interface. Yes, information can be added as needed, but it is still a far cry from a cognitive system. The Turing test said that if you think you are communicating with a human, than AI passes the test basically.

No dolphin could ever pass Turing Test. Yet no one who spent some time around dolphins will deny they are intelligent. For that matter a lot of humans will not pass Turing Test, especially if they are from a different cultural background than the person testing them. I do not know what Alan Turing was thinking, but his test is enormously restrictive.

Think of a robot (and I am fully aware that such robot is beyond current capabilities) designed for mountain rescue. It has to navigate very hazardous terrain, locate injured and possibly delirious people, evaluate the nature of injuries, supply first aid, secure a portable shelter on very non-flat ground and possibly in gale-force wind, and do many other things I had not thought of. Such robot would have to have cognitive functions which would make it intelligent by any reasonable definition. Yet it has absolutely no need to talk, except to reassure victims – and that can be done easily with ELIZA-type canned phrases. (All communications with other rescue units/personnel should be done by high speed electronic file transfer, not through slow and imprecise human speech.) Such robot will fare worse at Turing Test than your average parrot.

__________________
Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

It looks like AI has become the "efficient fusion" of the computing world.

__________________
"He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River."

--Anonymous

There have been threads on this forum where the definition of intelligence itself has been strongly debated, so is there a commonly accepted definition as applied to AI? And is it, by definition, limited to replicating human intelligence? If that's the case, dolphin intelligence would not qualify for consideration. Besides, I think we have a far easier time right now defining the parameters of our intelligence than that of dolphins. We don't even know yet to what level they're communicating.

Luckmeister

__________________
Why the avatar grin? I'm watching my favorite actress/model through my 4D glasses -- it sure beats looking at a tesseract.

Here is a pretty good article answering the question "what is artificial intelligence"--

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame...s/art0088.html

Well, it's obvious from that extensive coverage of the subject that AI is a very broadly defined field of study without just one definition of, or application of intelligence.

Luckmeister

__________________
Why the avatar grin? I'm watching my favorite actress/model through my 4D glasses -- it sure beats looking at a tesseract.

I went to one lecture about AI where the presenter defined it as "getting computers to do things that people do better."

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

It seems a lot of the debate on AI is some kind of "No True Scotsman" arguing, where every time a sub-problem of AI has been solved, the solution has been relabled an expert system, and derided by the True Followers(tm) of AI as not actually intelligent as they define it (which they don't).

__________________
An emperor without enemies, a king without a kingdom, supported in life by the willing tribute of a free people.

It seems to me that creating AI is an issue of the "programming medium" rather than the programming itself.

clop