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Artificial Intelligence Overview
spiderfarmer writes: "Well, it feels slightly odd to suggest one of my own articles, but here goes. I've recently completed a brief overview of the current state of AI. The article concept was focused on Cyc, but scope creep being what it is, I ended up doing an overview of the entire field. Some of the Slashdot gang were fairly helpful in pointing me towards experts who would talk to me and towards white papers and books I might not have otherwise found. So, I thought they might be interested in how I put all the information together."
Poker is an excellent domain for artificial intelligence research. It offers many new challenges since it is a game of imperfect information, where decisions must be made under conditions of uncertainty. Multiple competing agents must deal with probabilistic knowledge, risk management, deception, and opponent modeling, among other things.
Actually, while imperfect information makes poker a different problem than chess, it doesn't make it all that much deeper. I did research on a poker engine and one thing I learned is that it is possible to play poker (or bridge) using searches similar to those in chess. You can sample possible game trees instead of searching static ones because it's only necessary to pick a stratagy that make more money than it loses on average.
All sorts of things that look like psychology in poker (bluffing, slowplaying etc.) turn out to be mathematically tractable and actually mathematically provable necesities to competent play. There has to be some chance that you will misrepresent your hand, otherwise your play gives too much information to your opponent.
The really hard problem, as everyone probably already knows, is analysis and planning in situations where the search tree is too big for a chess like search and where sampling isn't good enough. Go is everyone's favorite example and that's a game of perfect information.
By the way the CYC project mentioned in the article (as self concious!!) will not be the slightest help in making machines talented enough to play go (or poker or chess or even do crossword puzzles for that matter). Nor will it be of any use in teaching a computer to see, hear, touch, manipulate objects or imagine. Nor will the program be able to make useful analogies, so it won't be able to communicate in a human way (and I also think it won't be able to think in any useful way either). In my opinion Dr. Lenat's only great accomplishment is performance art. He's fooled people into wasting 50 million dollars on a complete fraud. And he's still going. Chalk one up for NS (natural stupidity).
For an intelligent overview of what's wrong with CYC (unlike silly falicies from the likes of Roger Penrose and John Searl) and what an alternative might looke like I recomment Douglas Hofstadter's wonderful book, "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: computer models of the fundamental mechanisms of thought"
Cowardly Lion
Dr. Lenat and others in the field of AI research should know better than to make claims about consciousnes and morality in a public forum. Cognitive scientists don't even begin to agree on what consciousness is, let alone what it would take for a machine to replicate it. Some very respected individuals do not even think that human consciousness can be replicated within the forseeable future (e.g. Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind). Like any other scientific discipline, these sorts of claims should be left to peer review. Claiming to have invented a conscious machine would be akin to a physicist claiming to have unified quantum with relativity, but without having submitted their findings to any publication.
How about SONY's AIBO?
It's an interesting twist on the Turing Test definition of AI. Instead of giving Marvin Minsky 10s of millions of dollars to design machines that can somehow be quantitatively measured to be 'intelligent,' SONY produced a 1500 dollar robot dog that is designed to make you think that it is intelligent. And many people do think so (check out AIBO fan web sites ...).
The AI is kinda created client side (i.e. in your brain) rather than in the machine itself.
I saw one in Japan recently, in an electronics storefront. On the left, there was a widescreen tv with a SONY promo video playing. On the right there was a perspex cube about 24" on each side, with an AIBO bumping around inside of it. After watching this for about 5 minutes we began to feel quite sorry for the AIBO.
The basics to get self-aware systems is to define a self looping reasoning for the system. That is, the system must be able to observe it's OWN thoughts not only what is happening outside. It must be able to react and change it's thoughts by it's own thinking. That is very important. That also means you need to create a basic language system of some sorts for those underlying systems.
How can you be so sure of this? I for one am fully self-aware, and I strongly doubt that my own thoughts are observable by introspection, except for a very small part of them. AFAIK there isn't yet a man made self-aware system that works the way you prescribe.
"If you look at an encyclopedia, you'll see a great deal of knowledge of the world represented in the form of articles. Common sense is exactly not this knowledge. Common sense is the complement of this knowledge. It is the white space behind the words. It is all of the knowledge that the article writer assumed all of his/her readers would already have prior to reading the article -- knowledge that could be put to use in order to understand the article. Cyc is about representing and automating the white space." (I love that answer.)
Common sense is about representing and automating the white space?
I think these AI researchers need to talk to a few more sociologists. Human common sense is extremely culturally divergent and goes far beyond the simple, textbook logic cases that certain engineers in this field would probably cite. "Reading between the lines" involves not some native common sense that is wedded to intelligence, but a collectively evolved cultural contextualization. When we read an article in an encyclopedia, a lot of other stuff other than intelligence comes into play: x years of public school education, idiomatic constructs, varying by geographic location, that may or may not enhance or obscure meaning, and, of course, the double meanings and entendres inserted by bored or biased encyclopedia writers.
The entire postmodern project of literary criticism has been aimed at proving this point- at proving that there is no such thing as a standardized set of meanings, and that every meaning is contextualized. The Modernists wanted to rationalize and bureacratize speech, to restrict the number of meanings, and to leave what is unsaid in a narrow, predictable whitespace of a unified "common sense."
Of course, there is a language like this, developed in the first half of this century. It takes away as many English words as possible to restrict the meanings that we are able to THINK, let alone say. Of course, this language is called Newspeak.
Goat sex free since 2001
Lets say they succeed and make a completely, 100% self aware being. Nevermind if it's a computer or C3PO or a toaster. How do you suppose these new beings are going to react to...well, with lack of a better term, freedom robbing. This is a very distressing issue indeed.
I mean...consider it rationally. We, as humans, will probably feel somewhat superior to these "artificial" intelligences. The word "artificial" itself implies fake, and nobody likes fake better than the real thing (i.e. Humans). Basically, what I'm wondering, is how will these artificial intelligences react to racism and opression against them. Will they fight back? Will they have a somewhat less extreme implication of moral defence? It's all very important to know, both because this can spark potential wars if we ever do achieve "artificial intelligence" and it would mean alot for general human rivalry and emotion.
Analyzing how a "fake" creature reacts to abuse could teach us so much more about our own reactions to abuse.
You do not exist. Go away.
Don't make the mistake of attirbuting human motives to a computer just because it has a certain characteristic. I know that this can be tempting...
... well, she's quite familiar with the way to the Japanese resturant, and has solid habit patterns that tend to lead her in that direction from some corners when she must move, and doesn't have a direction firmly in mind. ... Was I talking about the AI or my wife (or my wife's car)? Well, the car doesn't have that kind of brain. But suppose you got in the car and said, "Take me to dinner.", that might be a reasonable description. But my wife would do it because she wanted to. The AI would do it because it was a minimum effort solution to a common problem that had just been posed.
... it would need to learn to avoid telling jokes. And it might find that quite ... disturbing? But to attribute any particular human emotion to the process would be .. misunderstanding. There would certainly be emotion analogs, but they wouldn't be close analogs to any particular human emotion. Or, if they were, it would be quite surprising. (They don't have the same "genetic" history determining their substrate ... it's much MUCH more reasonable to attribute similar emotions to cats.)
My wife talks of the car as "knowing the way to..." or "wanting to go to...". She doesn't actually believe this (I don't think she does), but she thinks I'm being silly to object to putting things this way. But when thinking about AI computers, this can be a good (and dangerous) model. "The car knows the way to the Japanese resturant."
The difference is that the AI doesn't have the motives for initiating action. Now some designs have "super-goals" that probably will never get fulfilled, but a) they didn't choose those goals, and b) someone else gave the goals to them. Of course a car might well have built in desires to keep the tires safely inflated, to avoid running out of gas, to keep the battery charged, etc. But these are quite different from anomie.
Perhaps people would choose to build AI's capable of feeling lonely. But this would be a design decision, not inherent. Or perhaps they would feel something that would be translated into English as lonely, but for which super-goal frustration in the absence of actionable choices would be a better name. It might well not have the rise and fall pattern of human loneliness. Or it might. A hierarchy of needs might cause an AI to experience a similar rise and fall in level of frustration at incapacity for making progress in less important goals. As if a car with the lower importance injunctions to "keep your owner healthy" and "laughter is the best medicine" were owned by an asthma sufferer
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.