[Up] [Map] [Prior] [Robot Wisdom home page] Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Wisdom [This section is actively under construction. Many links are broken, but expect things to be much improved, sooner or later...] It's been almost forty years since the term "Artificial Intelligence" was coined in 1956. During that time, A.I. has pretty successfully maintained an aura of arcane impenetrability, funneling off billions of dollars in research grants... while delivering almost nothing that can really be called 'intelligent'! This Web-branch will try to provide an overview of the state of AI, emphasizing one obscure sub-specialty called 'story representation' that I anticipate will be the key to future successes. I'm more or less an outsider to the world of AI, having read very little and taken only a couple of college courses. But from 1989 to 1992 I was one of the senior research programmers at Northwestern's AI lab-- the Institute for the Learning Sciences. Surprisingly, the programmers at ILS could get a much better education than the grad students, because we were under more pressure to create programs that stood up under the scrutiny of our sponsors, and under less pressure to deceive ourselves about the authenticity of our efforts! For more on my background in AI, click here. (1 gif, 8k) This Web-branch is derived from a FAQ I post irregularly to comp.ai, called the comp.ai.imho FAQ. [imho = in my humble opinion] You can ftp the latest version in text format. Many thanks to Rainer Blome ( or ) for the first html-version of this faq! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- An overview of Artificial Intelligence "A just machine to make big decisions Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision..." Donald Fagen "I.G.Y." There used to be a sense of idealism about AI-- that it was going to be a powerful force for the good of humanity. But that idealism is being squeezed out, instead, by hypocrites who crave money, status, and power. These 'experts' have turned AI into a battle for territory, obstructing progress, obscuring their trivialities behind impressive-sounding jargon, and turning this fundamental, urgently important domain of science into an exclusive club, with an artificially limited 'union card'... But AI is way too important to let this happen! What lies ahead for AI isn't just fancier productivity software-- we should be looking, much more, for a profound revolution in human self-understanding, to be swiftly followed by a parallel revolution in human self-government... so we shouldn't tolerate academic politics and grantsmanship! To jump straight to a particular topic you can use this index, but I recommend you first read thru the brief summary of the general argument that follows after it: * The prehistory of AI * LISP and symbolic computation * Natural language translation, natural language processing (NLP) * Hardware (& other) manias: Parallelism, neural nets, LISP machines, etc. * Expert systems and Cyc * Understanding human behavior via stories * Message filtering, object-oriented word-processing, software design * Vision, robotics, planning, simulation and artificial life * Consciousness * AI timeline ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- - AI's long prehistory begins with divination, then proceeds thru Aristotle to Leibnitz, Roget, and Polti-- all looking for a neat, universal sorting of the full range of human experience. The primary tools of this era were the abstraction hierarchy, and the concept of orthogonal dimensions... imho. Prehistory - With the invention of the programmable digital computer, such neat systematizations began to promise a whole new level of payback. One conceptual hurdle to be crossed, though, was the transition from arithmetic computation to symbolic computation, most notably via the invention of the LISP language. LISP's dramatic (imho) history will be explored. LISP - An early goal of AI research was automated translation between natural languages (eg, Russian to English). One line of research has focused on parsing the grammatical (syntactic) structure of sentences (basically a pattern-matching problem), another on representing the meanings, or semantics (that bigger problem that dates back to Aristotle). Emacs and SGML are useful tools for thinking about these problems. Current grammar-checkers and text-adventure games, poor as they are, may adequately represent the state of the art in these areas... imho. NLP - AI is prone to collective 'manias', regarding 'magical' hardware solutions, like parallel processing, LISP machines, neural nets, etc. ***TANSTAAFL*** ...imho. It's also prone to being poisoned by ego and greed, because of the combination of low standards and high stakes... again, imho. [***There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch] Hardware - Expert systems are AI's greatest success story, but so far their construction has normally been a one-off affair-- each one must be built from scratch by a labor-intensive process of 'knowledge extraction' and knowledge representation. The Cyc project is trying to fix this by building a huge, universal expert system by 'brute force'. From a programmer's point-of-view, though, the laying out of the data structures is the important thing-- the algorithms of logical expertise are comparatively trivial. And while Cyc is the most ambitious attack ever on the 'Aristotle problem', it offers as yet few breakthrus on the problems of representing human mental (and emotional) states... (imho). Cyc - The natural way to represent these mental states, and their laws, is in the form of stories. The Aristotle-problem turns out to require a universal inventory of human stories, following the groundwork laid out by Polti and, surprisingly, James Joyce. A new data topology, that unites the concept of the abstraction hierarchy with the idea of orthogonal dimensions, promises a new direction for story representation... imho. Stories Hot new Erasmatron page - One application for AI, near and dear to most of us, is netnews message filtering. Another, related one might be called "object-oriented word processing", where the 'objects' include words and phrases, concepts and stories. Designing intuitive software interfaces also has an important AI component... imho. Software - The ancient goal of self-contained robots with videocamera-eyes is still a long way off. A simpler form of robotics research focuses on moving virtual robots thru simulated worlds. Games like SimCity are state-of-the-art simulations. Along related lines, planning algorithms have tended to emphasize exhaustive combinatoric search, which is hopeless... imho. Simulation - Discussions about consciousness and pain and the ethics of artificially-created intelligences... bore me silly! They're premature, at best, and at worst, neurotic... imho! Philosophy [Up] [Map] [Next-Prehistory] [Robot Wisdom home page] (Feedback)