Artificial Intelligence
Definition:
All hail our robot overlords!
Hollywood has capitalized on movies that offer an unsettling view of
artificial intelligence. Usually these films center around a storyline
where machines become smart enough to direct their own behavior, and
eventually overthrow their human creators.
Hollywood's
Treatment of Artificial Intelligence
Can we ever capture the essence of humanity?
The Turing Test
- British mathematician, Alan Turing, answered the question "Can machines
think?" When a machine can have a conversation with a human and
be indistinguishable from a human then it can be said to be
capable of thought.
The Loebner Prize
- $100,000 and a gold medal to the first machine that can pass the
Turing test.
- However, ever year a contest is held to award bronze medals to the
creators of the "most human" machines.
Fear loss of humanity when lines between man and machine, man and beast,
become indistinguishable.
What are the applications of AI?
[taken verbatim from: www-formal.stanford.edu]
- game playing
- You can buy machines that can play master level chess for a few hundred
dollars. There is some AI in them, but they play well against people mainly
through brute force computation--looking at hundreds of thousands of
positions. To beat a world champion by brute force and known reliable
heuristics requires being able to look at 200 million positions per second.
- speech recognition
- In the 1990s, computer speech recognition reached a practical level for
limited purposes. Thus United Airlines has replaced its keyboard tree for
flight information by a system using speech recognition of flight numbers
and city names. It is quite convenient. On the the other hand, while it is
possible to instruct some computers using speech, most users have gone back
to the keyboard and the mouse as still more convenient.
- understanding natural language
- Just getting a sequence of words into a computer is not enough. Parsing
sentences is not enough either. The computer has to be provided with an
understanding of the domain the text is about, and this is presently
possible only for very limited domains.
- computer vision
- The world is composed of three-dimensional objects, but the inputs to
the human eye and computers' TV cameras are two dimensional. Some useful
programs can work solely in two dimensions, but full computer vision
requires partial three-dimensional information that is not just a set of
two-dimensional views. At present there are only limited ways of
representing three-dimensional information directly, and they are not as
good as what humans evidently use.
- expert systems
- A ``knowledge engineer'' interviews experts in a certain domain and
tries to embody their knowledge in a computer program for carrying out some
task. How well this works depends on whether the intellectual mechanisms
required for the task are within the present state of AI. When this turned
out not to be so, there were many disappointing results. One of the first
expert systems was MYCIN in 1974, which diagnosed bacterial infections of
the blood and suggested treatments. It did better than medical students or
practicing doctors, provided its limitations were observed. Namely, its
ontology included bacteria, symptoms, and treatments and did not include
patients, doctors, hospitals, death, recovery, and events occurring in time.
Its interactions depended on a single patient being considered. Since the
experts consulted by the knowledge engineers knew about patients, doctors,
death, recovery, etc., it is clear that the knowledge engineers forced what
the experts told them into a predetermined framework. In the present state
of AI, this has to be true. The usefulness of current expert systems depends
on their users having common sense.
- heuristic classification
- One of the most feasible kinds of expert system given the present
knowledge of AI is to put some information in one of a fixed set of
categories using several sources of information. An example is advising
whether to accept a proposed credit card purchase. Information is available
about the owner of the credit card, his record of payment and also about the
item he is buying and about the establishment from which he is buying it
(e.g., about whether there have been previous credit card frauds at this
establishment).
index
next
page
This website was created
for H0NOR210: The Ideal, a course offered at Monmouth College during the fall 2005
semester.