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."

Comments

Evil perception of AI replaced by Medical Science

[doctor_oktagon]

I'm only 30 years old, and as a child I remember the "scary" face of AI being presented to the public as living machines which would out-think humans and render us redundant, engineered by unethical scientists.

Nowadays AI is never mentioned in popular media. It has been replaced by the new emphasis in public-facing science: cloning and gene therapy.

This is the new AI in the mind of the ordinary citizen. It will lead to the destruction of the human race, and poses many ethical and moral questions. In the UK it is being demonised by the popular press without real debate, much like AI probably was 20 years ago.

Incidently, this was an excellent "heads-up" article for a novice like me, and I gained significantly from it.

Re:AI references

[HiThere]

Type comformant under assignment.
It's from Eiffel.
(It assigns Void (i.e., NULL) if the types aren't conformant, otherwise it does a normal assignment.)
It seems to be slightly misused here, however, since it appears that a test rather than an assignment is what is desired. isMember or is_kind_of would seem to be the more appropriate operators. (I hope I got the spelling right, I'm not currently using Python or Java.)