Slashdot Mirror
Ask Dr. Richard Wallace, Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Today's interview guest is Dr. Richard Wallace, creator of the Alicebot and AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language). Suggestion: look through some of the pages about Wallace in the first (Google search) link above before you start posting questions. Then, please, stick to the usual "one question per post." After this post has been up for around 24 hours, we'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Wallace, and post his replies verbatim (except for minor HTML formatting) soon after he sends them to us.
Special Fun Interview Bonus:
There is a site, www.pandorabots.com, where you can make your own Alice-style bot. I created SlashWallace using (mostly) default information about Dr. Wallace that is already on pandorabots.com. It might be kind of fun to see how the bot's responses stack up against the answers from the real Dr. Wallace, eh?
This is interesting. How far has the A.I. Come since it's creation? Can it disguish between man and machine? And how does it deal with textal representaions of voice influx? HI! is different that Hi...
Oops! I did it again
If the bot answers are roughly the same as Dr. Wallace's - Does that mean he is lazy, or a success?
Talk about a slashdot effect.....
I apparently forgot that sig != uptime...
How long do you feel it will be before AI is mainstream in the home? Such as a robot that will run around and pick up garbage, toys, etc. or something that can do random daily tasks for you, to name a couple.
My other sig is an import.
If Alice speaks roughly like Dr. Wallace does, why don't we just ask it instead? :=)
Dr Wallace:
America Online has previously made it well known that they take no pleasure in folks using their trademark'd "AIM" acronym (it's for AOL Instant Messenger) in various products and/or tools and/or anything else, and have made it a mission to stomp out any use of it except in their own products/services. Have they approached you about the use of the letters A, I, and M in the acronym for AIML?? How would you respond if they do? Or, if they have approached you, how did you respond?
Thanks!
-Concerned Anonymous Coward
What would you add to Lisp to make it more useful to the field of AI?
Will you implement the tag?
Ok so as I heard it last from one of the pages Dr. Richard Wallace was quoted on, A.I. was still not able to distinguish the difference between a man and a machine, with all the new technology since then is it now possible to do that?
...post his replies verbatim (except for minor HTML formatting) soon after he sends them to us.
Guys, forgetting to close your tags, while technically 'formatting', isn't really an achievement. Seriously though, why aren't these interviews ever formatted properly? Half the time there are at least a few questions that run into the answers...what the hell are we paying you guys for?
Do you think that the ever increasing processing power will eventually enable us to fully simulate the human brain? What ramifications would this have for the A.I discipline?
Stop the brainwash
How do we know it is _actually_ Dr. Wallace answering, and not some clever AI app, in a modern, twisted Turing Test of "your" newest technology?
S
Wouldn't even get across a bridge:
Human: what is your name?
SlashWallace: My name is SlashWallace.
Human: what is your favorite color?
SlashWallace: My favorite color is transparent.
Human: what is the airspeed of a swallow?
SlashWallace: That's not something I get asked all the time.
<whoosh>
SlashWallace: aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
p.s. This is also by PIth post. Yep, that's right: my 314th post. I was going to do something cool for it, but I guess this will have to do.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Just so we are clear, who is responding to these questions, you or the bot? Does it matter?
What single event was the trigger for your lending your support to the Free Software Movement?
CLIT. Are you a memb
If artificial intelligence fails in the middle of a forest with no one to think about it...
Does it make a sound?
Dr. Wallace,
How much time do you estimate we have until Alice
takes over the world?
- David
Dr. Wallace, what is your opinion on the concept that there may already have arisen true artificial intelligences that have gone unrecognized as such, because their processes are sufficiently 'other' that we do not have the capability to recognize them as intelligences?
Brazil has decided you're cute.
well, if you are so scary smart, why dont YOU write a fuckin AI routine, genius?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
As I understand it, Alicebot uses a rather complex set of lists with Questions and Answers; which does not qualify as 'Real' AI to me. When do you think there will be Bots which do not rely on lists, but rather perform real reasoning (in neural nets, for example)?
Furthermore, do you believe that these interconnected lists of Questions and Answers will evolve into real reasoning over time (through increased complexity)?
-mz
(1.) Alice and most of Eliza's children breakdown at some point and become a great big laundry list of rules for dealing with specific minutae about language and intelligence in general. Are rule-based minutae where we will make progress in AI, or are we still waiting for something like the discovery of AI's DNA to spur a revolution?
(2.) I was thinking about Alice one day (fantasizing perhaps even) and I realized that a week point with such intelligence will be humor. How would one make a chatbot capable of understanding humor? Humor is off-the-cuff, it plays on the moment, it thwarts Grice's maxims. How do we cope with this?
(3.) Are unicellular organisms or even nucleic acids or their simulations for that matter intelligent? I don't want to start a debate a al Searle, but at what point does the approach towards the limit of a "brain" yeild intelligence?
It has come up in conversation that ALICE thinks intelligence to be an illusion. If this is so, why bother emulating human intelligence? Why not try to create a machine that is capable of reasoning at the expense of easy communication? ALICE is just an illusion, if a pretty sweet one. Note that this is from someone who spent 15 minutes last night arguing that the sky is in fact not blue at night, but black.
Hi,
Bots have been in the making for years, but from what I've seen I found the mock "human interaction" to be more a gimic than a useful tool. In what ways do you see bots being most useful in the immediate future?
Kind Regards,
Rob
How long do you think it will be untill computers will be able to directally interface with the human mind and what kind of role will AI play in this?
Early AI assumed they could define the input output relations of their systems ignoring the details of the real world. I.e. people would write programs to pass the turing test. Wouldnt it make much more sense to build systems that learn from radio or video. Such systems might one day be able to learn to imitate people without any supervision.
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
What responsibility do the creators hold for evil bots?
To make robots more human, will artificial stupidity have to be invented?
Neural networks usually degrade after sometime of "learning". Basically the computer can learn so much before it starts to "retard" because of physical hardware limitations. Do you think that quantum computing will help this; do you even think quantum computing is feasible for AI in general?
Me: > who let the dogs out?
:-)
:-)
ALICE: Linus Torvalds.
My question is, what is going on in ALICEs mind?
Will work for bandwidth
He named his son Linus
. ht ml
" He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Kim, and son, Linus. "
http://alice.sunlitsurf.com/bios/richardwallace
The regular definition being "self-awareness", I'm wondering if this is also the definition you are using to define when the machine is more than "just a program", or do you have a better one which better describes when an AI "program" becomes more than a program?
How smart is a person beleiving that there is a service&support market for their apps?
Come on, buy some service&support for my editor, pleeeeeeeeease!
Is there a next leap for AI? if so, what is it?
It's all good.
Just for fun, I asked slashwallace a shortened version of the question, do you think your response would differ?
Human: Historically AI has done poorly managing the public's expectations, do you think this will continue?
SlashWallace: Where did he get it?
Do you ever think or worry about A.I. causing a world like the Matrix where computers control humans?
void main () {
while (true) {
x++;
}
return -5;
}
Biological neurons have been shown in the laboratory to grow new connections based on information learned. In a robot, what possible mechanism could guide such growth? Programming is the only answer, but keep in mind that "programming" is just shorthand for "the intelligence of the programmer". In other words, the AI itself isn't self-contained, as it were. It requires a smart person to set the whole thing up beforehand.
There is no other way for such "mental" activity to be guided, thus AI will always be as unattainable as the Philosopher's Stone.
Is the creation and distribution of AI applications, and in the future "True" AI, hampered by the limitations in programming languages such as C++ and Java? In order to move to the next step will it be necessary to move to languages like LISP? Also do you feel that different Software Engineering methods need to be developed before we can produce sentinent programs? I mean if we can't even engineer a word processor or email app without lots of holes and bugs, how can we make an AI? I can't imagine having to patch a true AI.
any one wants to use this go ahead....... In a news article that i have read about four days ago I have heard of the new technology integrated into new constructed houses, it is being said that it is a form of A.I. in which the building can read the tempature outside and then create the perfect temperature in side, aswell as other different things the "A.I." does is that the Computer works the doors aswell as the widows. My question to you is are you helping a hand with this work and/or do you ever plan to be involved in a program like this?
Dr. Wallace,
If humanity succeeds in creating a concious AI, what rights do you think it should have? What kind of morality is there in turning off the computer it's running on? Or in deleting its files?
Anyone catching my last post would remember that my uptime was 121 days and change on my workstation without a UPS. Now, I got a hardcore UPS, Journalled Filesystems, and am ready for anything!
Beat that W2K!
I would like to know how you feel about the integration of artificial intelligence into our society. Do you believe that, like electricity to many of us now, we will someday require artificial intelligence in our everyday lives (save a few exceptional groups), and do you believe this is a good thing?
Cheers!
Brian
ps. bonus question, food for thought: "who" gets the libel for AI decisions?
I have chatted with Alice, and it was quite interesting. However, the basis of Alice is flawed. Turing's test ultimately amounts to just a toy program. Alice is incapable of understanding any meaningful relationships. In my opinion, GPS was much more sophisticated than Alice will ever be because it is based on logic. What is your opinion?
This was a favorite topic at my first conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-77 (at MIT). Haven't heard many people talk about it since. Are emotions still considered integral to intelligence?
My favorite AI quote: "Intelligence is what computers can't do... yet"
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
Since I was about 10, I have been very interested in AI, and typed in a BASIC version of Eliza from a book a long time ago.
I'm wondering how much ALICE is an improvement on the fundamental design of ELIZA? Is it just a more complex ELIZA, or is there a real technology improvement involved? This question isn't to imply that ALICE isn't a major functional improvment over ELIZA, it's just a question of technology.
BTW, a fun thing to say to ALICE is 'your stupid', I love it's response:
I may be stupid, but at least I know the difference between "your" and "you're."
What is the difference between, for example, a software program that has merely Artificial Intelligence progammed into its subroutines, and one that has conciousness as a result of how it is programmed?
Do you think that research and development into A.I. will eventually lead to concious machines or programs, and will that final quantum leap be intentional or incidental?
Ceci n'est pas une
Hey Dr you got some holes in alicebot. You need to read http://www.cgisecurity.com/articles/xss-faq.shtml which can assist you with understanding the problem.
Do you think that in the future we will be able to talk to our computers as if they were real humans, so well done we could never see the difference?
Will work for bandwidth
What makes a person smart really? There are lots of people that is good as some specific thing but sucks at others.
:)
Most tech-oriented people I know of sees themselfs as smarter than everyone else.
Do you think tech-people are smarter or is that just an illusion?
(The last years has shown that they certainly isn't smarter when it comes to business-sense, thats for sure
As suggested (and denied) in Hofstadter marvelus book, do you think that Goedel Theorem affects the viability of a machine develping consciusness?
As a friend of mine says. Humans begin to fly when they stopped wraping their wings, and became aware of Bernouilli principle (when refering to neural-nets). Do you think that kind of understanding of consciuness can be developped?
someone will ever come up with a definition for Consciousness that will appeal to everyone? Or are we doomed to attempt to simulate something we`ve not yet defined forever?
really want computers that can have a 'bad hair day'?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What is your opinion on people who approach the issue of artificial intelligence from a modeling standpoint, rather than simply
Throughout the 1980's a lot of companies
staked their reputations and resources in their
efforts to produce intelligent software. The next great
advance is just around the corner, so they say.
Intelligent and knowledge-based software
will herald a revolution in the way humans use
and interact with software. Software will no longer be
like automatons mindlessly following the same code recipe
again and again, instead they shall be able to think
and reason.
Of course none of it happened. AI became a disappointment
and such a failure that the very same companies
that touted their AI and knowledge-based software
very soon tried hard to avoid any association
of their products with AI.
My question is: why should we even care about AI now?
For all we know, we might be repeating the
same false hopes and wrong turns that happened 20 years ago. Perhaps
there is indeed something in humans that just cannot be
duplicated by a machine.
What makes you think that a real thinking machine
is indeed possible and that AI is a subject
worthy of consideration and study?
There has been a lot of criticism of the Alice bot because of it's "shallow" method of generating responses. i.e. it doesn't fundamentally understand the question being asked, it lacks the ability to form a creative response, the solution doesn't create an AI that can be applied to other significant problem spaces, etc. Does Alice bot really improve our understanding of intelligence or is it just yet another beep-blue-esque AI dead end?
Computers measure in quantities. Humans in qualities. Will computers have to measure qualitatively before they will become a true AI? If not, will they have to change before they become a human AI?
How do you respond to people who say that things like ALICE are not "real" AI, they are simply parlor tricks, and they give us no further insight into the working of the brain or the nature of intelligence?
Should we expect for ai to supercede as the most viable "animal" for future evolutionary progress?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I finished a B.Sc in AI almost 5 years ago now. I noticed that the field had a tendency to jump from one shift in thinking to another over time. Discrete list-based and knowledge management systems were overtaken by more fuzzy concepts like neural networks and genetic algorithms.
Assuming there is another paradigm shift around the corner, what areas of research do you think it will grow out of?
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
Is that your bot being used for customer service in certain company's websites, like ATT?
If so are you aware that it is not helpful at all.
Another poster said that AI greatly suffers by its proponents tendencies to exagurate its abilities.
Do you think that selling your bot as a customer service agent is repeat of the above mistake. The bot is obviously unable to fill the role (cannot process the simplest queries) and putting it in that role will only infuriate people and give AI another black eye.
Of course that is only valid if it is your bot, thats being used. The ATT site called the bot Allie so i suspect it is.
Human: I am sick
SlashWallace: Have you tried medical marijuana?
yes. yes I have.
--
pants ahoy
What do you think of people who attempt to build up a consciousness of intelligence from a top-down approach? It seems that your approach is more bottom-up, in other words, let's keep asking it questions, and when the responses diverge significantly from expected, we'll add new clarifiers.
This seems to me a little like growing ivy up a wall and putting stakes in it every time it strays from the path you intend. It works, but it requires event-to-event correction for a long time before it becomes stable.
Do you think that real artificial intelligence will come from this process, starting with a running dummy and stub methods, or from careful design and planning, so that in the end we can flip the switch and have a working prototype? Is ALICE a reflection of your beliefs or just an experiment?
In your opinion would A.L.I.C.E. pass the Turing Test for Artifical Intelligence? If you feel A.L.I.C.E. would pass this test, why? If you feel A.L.I.C.E. wouldn't pass this test do you know of something that would pass this test and what do you feel will be necessary to have A.L.I.C.E. pass the Turing Test? Also if you feel A.L.I.C.E. won't pass it do you think it is possible for a "chat bot" to pass the Turing test? Do you feel the Turing test is a good test of Artifical Intelligence?
Could you compare Hardware based AI (i.e. AI which is AI because it is designed from hardware specifically for the purpose, such as a physical neural net) with software AI (i.e. AI which is simulated using a serial processor)?
Is software based AI running on serial processors simply a matter of a drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Why does discussion about artificial intelligence attract so many cranks who have their own wacked theory? And likewise why are there so many philosophers who have no background in mathematics, computer science, or even medicine so certain that computers can never do what a human does?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I'm no rocket scientist, but I can't get past the notion that AI simply takes a goal, gives the algorithmic rules that apply to the world, and lets the algorithm go nuts trying out new stuff.
I'm thinking particularly of a genetic model I saw a few years ago, where the goal was "maximize speed," the ruleset provided physical characteristics of the world (i.e. gravity, friction coefficient of the ground, and so on), and while the results were interesting, I'd have trouble characterizing any of that as thought.
As such, when you set a goal of "reasonable conversation," and provide a ruleset and knowledge base, the machine isn't so much "thinking" as internally contesting two reactions to the ruleset.
Am I missing something?
ceci n'est pas un sig.
Does the AliceBot combine different AI techiniques?
If so, what techniques does it combine and how?
If not, have you considered combining different techniques, and if so what were your conclusions, and why did you rule it out?
Specifically, have you considered or used any Bayesian network or decision theory techniques?
I would speculate that, as an enhancement to basic pattern matching, Bayesian network modeling might add power to disambiguation by dealing with uncertainties in a managable way, and decision theory techniques could help the bot choose between alternative courses of action based on its current objectives and definition of utility.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
How useful would an AI online applet (similar to SETI@home) be to AI research? Users all over the world could converse with a learning AI entity. The applet could pick up vocabulary and grammar, and transmit trees it had assembled to a centralized recepticle which would accumulate knowledge. In general, how useful is surveying human intelligence to AI?
How do you think the current media treat AI as a science and as a tool for society? Specifically, a lot of stories about AI tend to be sensationalist (i.e. the "escaped" robot story from about a month ago) and don't really concern themselves with the facts. Is the field hurt or helped by media portrayals of AI?
Dr. Wallace,
Do you think that we will see an AI scheme -- expert system or otherwise -- that will be "smarter" than Grommit within the next 20 years?
My
Limekiller
Captain's Log: The damn bot keeps talking back to me. Even when I go use the can, it's there and running on about my senility and how the damned dirty apes ruined earth. I thought about melting him down and having him made into one of those old fashioned scooters but it wouldn't be nice.
:P
Do you ever worry or wonder if we will live out Terminator/T2 in the next 25 years seeing how we are already behind the august '97 date?
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.
What are your views on running AI programs through a natural selection process? Is it nesscary for an AI's growth, or does it narrow the program ability to think to one task?
Do you think there is potential for tieing neural nets , heuristics and HMM together in a user interactive environment.
Using HMM to predict what the user is lightly to request or say next for things like UI's and Alice.
Heuristics for a general statistics and knowledge base
and Neural nets to learn how to use the Heuristics and HMM and Neural nets better.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
More than one question, I know, but was hoping you'd let me get away with it this one time...
So what did you think about working with Mel Gibson - do you think he did an accurate representation of you in Braveheart?
Do you think the English would have been driven out without your peculiar "It's MY island" style in your AI work?
Did any of the primitive Scots suspect your use of the Age of Empires expansion pack in coming up with your astoundingly successful battlefield plans?
Any chance of a "Braveheart II: Reloaded" where "you" are rebuilt as an AI bot and restored from backup tapes? Think of how surprised the 'nobles' will be when you show back up after being ripped apart and spread all over England!
Programming is the only answer, but keep in mind that "programming" is just shorthand for "the intelligence of the programmer". In other words, the AI itself isn't self-contained, as it were. It requires a smart person to set the whole thing up beforehand.
This is simply not so. A trained neural network
might "know" things that its programmer doesn't
know. This is because a neural network isn't
told how to make decisions, it is given a set of
facts (the training set) and it comes up with
its own rules for deriving correct answers.
How well these rules extrapolate outside the
training set depends on how well the training
set represents the test set (presumably the
real world) and the training method used.
Do a little research into artificial neural nets
before deciding that AI is impossible.
--Dan Ost
*sigh* back to work...
If we start from the fact that we are not yet able to fully understand the human brain, and that we are not even able to fully understand human behaviors and there fundamental motivations, how is it possible to model an A.I. which would behave like a human being?
I'd rather be sailing...
Do you think that AIML will ever have any type of advanced pattern matching (something similar to regular expressions) or has it been decided to keep the patterns simple? I know there are a lot of smart people out there who could write some great AIML if they could use more advanced patterns.
if(!cool) exit(-1);
Have you considered using an evolutionary technique such as genetic programming to test the fitness of AIML rules? Have you tried generating new rules from combinations of old rules via some crossover/mutation mechanism?
any opinions regarding intro to AI books?
ceci n'est pas un sig.
What do you think of efforts to "create" AI by collecting huge amounts of information, such as the Mindpixel and Cyc projects?
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
My question is, do you have a favourite commercial application you'd like to see AI used for?
Like a lot of R&D, I think that if you can get somebody interested in it as a money making/saving investment, advances will proceed quickly. I can see a few potential markets for this kind of thing, e.g. basic customer support via the phone: try to resolve some small % of calls, steer the rest to an actual person.Hmm...
Here's my opinion, as a systems design bloke.
Inteligent systems can be build using a mix of top down and bottom up approaches.
This is a very crude example
An AI system should never spell things incorrectly because It's easy to give it a dictionary, that it can add new words to using a top down approach.
But it may ask you the wrong questions and give you the wrong answers until it learns to comunicate correctly, this requires a bottom up approach.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
It seems to me that the benchmark for qualififying as an intelligent being keeps on being revised as computers achieve them. Once math skills were considered the ultamate in intelligence. After that came chess.
Do you think the Turing test will be written off in the same way once it is passed?
We hear a lot about processing power, the number of "neurons" in a neural net, the Turing test, etc, but not so much about the actual nature of intelligence and self-awareness. That said, how much do Strange Loops and complex self-referenciality a la Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" factor into current AI theories and practice? Is the 20+ year-old thinking in this book still relevant? If not, what has changed about our understanding of the nature of intelligence and self-awareness?
Thank you Dr. W.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
History tells us that Weizenbaum was quite horrified at the reaction people had to Eliza, and how such a simple program could invoke such strong emotional responses in people. I believe he went on to suggest that we didn't need (or perhaps would never attain) true AI because people would simply project their own illusions onto whatever model they were given.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Truley your AI strategy has been about weak AI instead of strong AI since you are using the stimulus response method.
Some have said that a stimulus response AI can be only as intelligent as a jelly fish.
Others say that your AIML method that allows this is nothing more than a slick database lookup trick that has the ability to randomly choose successful matches.
Do these "some" have any merit to their claims?
How come the pills that mother gives me don't do anything at all?
I would ask Alice, but she's slashdotted at the moment, and I don't know how to tell when she's ten feet tall anyway.
Do you not think that the term "Artificial Intelligence" is more than often misused, especially by so-called "AI" researchers themselves? AI rules generally fall into two statistical categories, classification or regression. Why are they not known as statistical functions then? It seems to me that computer scientists and engineers are particularly keen to play god and hence the misnaming of mathematical functions. See for example this excellant paper by Warren Sarle, a statistician who maintains the comp.ai.neural-nets FAQ.
There seems to be (from a layman's point of view) a relatively big movement in the cognitive sciences claiming that human reason is inherently tied to perception and embodiment.
Particularly, this school claims that humans do not just base the basic structures of their logic on their sensorial perceptions (Damasio's "Descartes' Error"), but that they reuse the logic they develop to process perception, to process higher-level logic and language per se (Johnson and Lakoff's "Philosophy in the Flesh").
For example: the human mind, with complex instinctive and learned algorithms to deal with movement and position, would map causal reasoning to changes in movement and position and use the same algorithms (through the same hardware) to deal with it.
What would be the implications of such embodiment of reason on AI? Specifically, if a robot were given basic sensorial perceptions to approximate a human, motor ability, the logic to deal with these two, and the ability to map and reuse this logic for other purposes... would this make it better at "language AI" (approximate human processing of language)?
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Have you ever considered modifying your bot to be able to post to Slashdot? Do you think that, without the constraint of real-time interaction, you might be able to create a bot which would pass for human more often?
If not, have you considered USENET or any other discussion-style format?
I noticed that your AliceBot won the 2000 Loebner Prize for most human responses. My question is: "As an Artificial Intelligence researcher, do you feel that the Loebner Prize represents a legitimate variety of testing, or did you just want the $2000?"
I was pretty sure that almost all AI researchers came to the agreement about thirty years ago that the original imitation game as proposed by Turing in 1951 was useful only as a mental exercise, not in practice. Do you feel that the types of developments that the Loebner prize supports(intentional, hard-coded spelling mistakes, etc.) are actually productive in terms of the AI research project?
Ok... that kind of looks like two questions, but just pretend that I worded it better and made it one question.
lysergically yours
Should a fully AI system be able to use all Human-like stimulus and be able to react accordingly?
Where do you draw line between something that is artificially intelligent (capable of creative/logical reasoning) and something that has awareness/conciousness?
How do you tell the difference? Simply asking it wouldn't seem to be enough (or is it?), although we take each others conciousness and sense of self for granted.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
You are a dumbass aren't you. Tom Ridge intends nothing of the sort. Here is a quote from the article you linked:
"[It] goes against our instincts as a country to empower the military with the ability to arrest,"
The article goes on to say:
"Most senators favour a form of compromise that would permit an amendment to the existing law to allow armed forces to aid domestic forces in a supportive role in the event that another terror attack was carried out on US soil."
Do you enjoy being a paranoid, fear-mongerer?
Most machine intelligence techniques I have come across (like neural nets, genetic algorithms and expert systems) require some for of training. A "reward algorithm", if you will, that reinforces certain behaviour mechanisms so that the system "trains" to do something you want.
I would assume that humans derive these training inputs much the same way, since pain receptors and pleasure sensations influence our behaviour much more than we would think at first.
The question is: For a "true" AI that mimics real intelligence as close as possible, what do you think would be used as training influences? Perhaps a neural net (or statistical analysis) could decide on which input should be used to train the system?
Are people worrying about moral ramifications, training an artificial Hitler, for example, or one with a God complex? (This last question is totally philosophical and I would be sincerely surprised if I ever see it affect me during my lifetime.)
Am I the only one who is afraid the interview will look something like this:
Q. Where do you see the field of artificial intelligence in five, ten, and twenty years?
A. Why do you ask where do i see the field of artificial intelligence in five, ten, and twenty years?
Many people shrug off the Loebler competition as just a demonstration of "yet another Eliza" every year. Do you have any plans (or defense) to show that this is not the case with Alice, or do you have no more loftier goal than to simply be the best chatbot engine around?
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Kind off, it all depends.
If you say that evolution is a learning process then I can't.
If your saying from birth that I can say that,
Men and Women have different skills, there not learn't but in ouw bones(brains) so to speek, this shows that everything is not learnt.
Why are fat people called fat when fat people have more skin than skinny peoply do?
B0t kan't undastand slashd0t.
Mr. Wallace, is AIML a marketing plot to get more funds?
Will my computer ever be smarter so I can have an intelligent conversation with him?
Will my computer ever be smart enough to write programs of his own? Do my homework? (homework is boring to be frank)
How long do you estimate until this happens? 2020?
Mod this shit down. You are talking about Aimster which was a product that AOL considered confusingly similar to their own. I don't see how an Artificial Intelligence system would be confused with an Instant Messenger (unless it is a really good system). You also notice that AIML is not a product, it is a markup language and in no way does it even come close to compteting with AIM. Maybe should learn something about Trademark law before posting again.
But he doesn't have to. He built in the weights, the activation levels, even the neural structure. He optimized all of this for his problem beforehand.
It's like precisely laying down 4 lines in a tic-tac-toe configuration and methodically programming the rules of the game into a computer, in the form of "if the player does A, you do B" and then saying "but that specific game wasn't programmed in, this must be AI!". BS.
What AIML? Why not use Lisp which is good to write both functions AND data AND knowledge.
Less is more !
After you're done answering our questions, would you please feed the questions to one of your AIs so that we can compare your answers to its?
/. posted a few days ago...
For fun, post both sets of answers in randomized order* so that we can try to guess whether it was man or machine who answered.
*insert link to that random order statistics story that
[o]_O
According to a story at the BBC Web site, a "free thinking" robot scheduled for repairs escaped from a holding pen and made a run for it, eventually being stopped in the Magna Science Center's parking lot. As robots become better able to understand concepts such as slavery, abuse, and loneliness, what obligations do humans have to ensure such robots are not enslaved and are afforded some level of human dignity?
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
HMM is a way of using trained statistics to predict what will come next, so that a bot can ask a question, but have a good knowlage of what the response will be.
So long as the trys to keep you response on topic, and fairly well withing the knowage of the bot then you'll get a reasonable conversation.
I really enjoyed that old wired article were you equated intelligence with deception. Do you think that without deception there is no intelligence and do you think that we are tricking ourselves into thinking we are intelligent.
I heard another researcher compare intelligence to the ability to make decisions after evaluating possible outcomes to different actions. Do you think ALICE does this? How would you program software to evaluate feedback from a user. Perhaps you could have the users give feedback to the software by clicking a button depending on how accurate the bot was at giving a humanlike response.
I thought perhaps AI would be made by designing a computer to think like a infant and then teaching it like you would an infant for years. But how would you give it postitive and negative feedback. Without biological impetous and positive and negative emotions how could you stimulate or motivate a bot to learn? How would you make desires in software similar to biological creatures desires and emotions.
Often it is said that todays computers have the eqivalent brains of small insects. When will computers have enough power to equal that of a mammalian brain? Or even a human? 50 years? or 1000? Will the invention of clusters of computers accelerate the process of AI? Have you had any experience w/ clustered or distributed computing with AIML.
Thanks Doc. I really enjoy your research and hope to contribute if I ever get the chance.
--------
get jiggy w/ ayn rand!
How did you manage to convince people that you didn't just copy the old Eliza program, rename it Alice, and call it "AI"?
Sucks to be a Windows user.
-g.
Dr. Richard Wallace,
I have experimented both with Alice and the original Eliza (person-centered therapist emulator) written roughly some 35 years ago.
In conducted tests, Eliza was more believable than Alice in many aspects.
How exactly is the Alice AI core engine superior to one of Eliza which was written by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966?
Thanks.
Do you think a binary machine (like a main stream microprocessor), which is built on the concept of successively executed operations, has the capability to create human like thought, or is a unique hardware solution required?
"Understanding" an utterance usually means to perform various analysis steps. This involves a tremendous amount of (linguistic and) world knowledge.
A big issue among language technology researchers is whether this is necessary at all when bringing speech to computers. Is a dialog (or just a single natural language utterance) supposed to be deeply analyzed in terms of syntactic structure and its semantic and rhetorical contribution? The alternative is to apply statistical models and rather simple knowledge. Up to now, the latter systems are known to give quicker results.
RW, how much does a computer really need to know to make it a good replacement for a, say, sales clerk in a web shop?
Dr. Wallace, it is my understanding that you too have bipolar disorder, more commonly known as manic depression. Do you feel you have ever faced discrimination?
I was diagnosed when I was quite young and have been on daily medication for a very long time. How do you deal with it? What do you do when you are about to have an episode?
I don't really know how to ask all the questions I want to ask you. I am a huge fan of your work, all the more for having read several articles in major newspapers detailing your life story. Those department heads sound like total assholes. I guess a good final question would be what times of your life do you feel that bipolar has prevented you from doing something you wanted to do?
Long form:
One of the classic bits of worry about AI, and about advanced computing systems in general, is that "computers will take over the world". That is, if we give computer systems motivations such as survival and growth, and the autonomy and judgement to fulfill those motivations, that they will do so without regard for us poor dumb humans -- and indeed see us as either an obstacle or an exploitable part of their environment. This is the premise behind numerous popular SF works, such as "Terminator" and "The Matrix": that the moral judgement of an AI is necessarily inhuman and without respect for humanity.
One response to this concern in SF (which in fact long pre-dates those works) is Asimov's "Laws of Robotics" -- the idea of designing AI systems (robots, in his case) such that respect for humans is one of their primary motivations. This seems to permit the robot to have moral judgement and autonomy without placing humans at risk.
The question of creating an AI system capable of moral judgement is both philosophically fascinating and evidently of survival interest to humanity. What kinds of design parameters -- motivations, "laws of robotics", and so forth -- do you think will be necessary as AI systems become more autonomous? How must AI morals differ from the morals that evolution (both genetic and cultural) has emplaced in humanity?
For that matter, we as humans feel morally obligated to one class of entities which we "create" -- our children. Recently, genetic science has brought to light an ethical quandary for many potential parents: whether it is right to attempt to create a genetically "optimized" child, or for that matter to abort a genetically "flawed" one. The argument on one side is that flawed persons have a right to exist, and that the quest to optimize humanity despises or disrespects what humanity is today. On the other side is the view that given the ability to create stronger, smarter, healthier children that we are morally amiss to refuse to take that step. Peter Singer in particular has become both famous and infamous over this matter.
Do you see the same quandary possible in the creation of AI systems? Positing the possibility of AI systems capable of suffering -- is it wrong to create one with this capacity? Given that the choice to create or not to create an AI does not involve the ethical hazards of abortion, eugenics, or euthanasia -- what obligations can we have towards our future AI creations in this regard?
Have you considered combining Alice with RDF/DAML and an inference engine?
[OT]
Some of us think you've been treated very shabbily by the mainstream academic community, I for one do appreciate your work, please keep it going, Signed A Big Fan
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
The pursuit of human level machine intelligence has been gaining momentum in the past decade. The introduction and advancement of biologically plausible neural networks, the work of John Taylor, Hugo DeGaris and others has led me to believe that we are finally approaching the realization of human level intelligence and cognition. However, these new advancements have diverged drastically from the techniques used in ALICE, do you still believe there is a place for ALICE style intelligence?
> How does it feel to be slashdotted?
Much the same as it would feel for you, except different.
Wow, I'm seeing where the artificial part is coming in.
Your mammas flamebait.
I was impressed that it could answer "What is a botmaster?". But when I referred to previous statements without giving proper nouns, it got confused. "I think about programming computers a lot" "Do you do any?" "Yeah I do a lot of any."
This is probably just because of the bot having old information but it made me lol.
Human: how high is the sears tower?
SlashWallace: Taller than the World Trade Center.
Do you think we will eventually get to a point were an AI system is able to gather common sense knowledge from a giant corpus, such as the web? What are the problems we will have to solve?
I'm quite fond of Alice way of dealing with the AI. I think this is the simpler yet most realistic method of faking a conversation yet.
Now, what kind of improvement do you plan for Alice, if any ? Is there a way to improve this reductionism concept to make it even more "real" ?
theefer
Dr Wallace:
On what principles do we base our ethics concerning AI? If one day we do have AI that either matches or surpasses our own behavior and intellect, do we give computer software "rights"? Or, more importantly, if we do demonstrate that our human brains are nothing more than computational algorithms, how do we avoid having our rights reduced to that of computer programs?
Like the three blind men and the elephant, the definition of AI seems to shift depending on whom you talk to. To some, it's approximate reasoning, to others it's heuristics and analogical research, to others it's connectionism, and to still others it's whatever we're not sure how to do yet.
So, what does the term AI mean to you and what do you see as the next big application of AI techniques?
That is all.
It works, but it requires event-to-event correction for a long time before it becomes stable
Hmmm, sounds like normal human growth from childhood to adulthood. Series of corrections along the way. (Teachers and environment.) Takes at least 18 years of 14 hour days last time I checked.
Assuming that AI reaches the level of semi-conscious, or conscious thought, do you think that the AI personality will want or develop vices? By vices, I mean, alchol, drugs, pain killers -- anything that dulls or sharpens the senses.
so can the blue fairy really grant wishes?
Some questions I have about AI deal with human emotions and the ability to have faith and or belief in something. Is it possible for an AI to achieve emotions without them being all pre-programmed? I mean like is an AI going to get jealous if you spend more time with yoru wife? Is it going to feel lonely when you go and watch a movie in the other room? Is it going to be happy when it doesnt something right? Will it know what fun is? What about Love?
As for belief, will an AI be able to belief in something greater than itself? Will it be able to trust? trust too much? Will it have faith?
- "My name is Legion, for we are many" -Mark 5:9
Do you think that when I talk about "AI" I should be referring to "thinking" machines that simulate or somehow replicate human intelligence?
Or do you think I should be referring to a whole host of clever tricks that make us say "Wow, that solves a problem cleverly that we didn't think was subject to brute force."
It seems like there is a lot of hype about AI, but all sorts of ideas out there about what we mean when we mention "AI" at all. What do you think we (nerds) should think of "AI" as?
Even in todays age we do not understand what creates consiousness. True we have a fairly good understanding of how the brain will respond to certain inputs, faces vs. other shapes, words in a language you understand vs. words or other sounds in languages you are unfamiliar with, etc. Yet, even with all of this knowledge no one has any firm ideas about what creates consciousness, we can predict what will happen electrically 9 times out of 10, but we can not figure out what it is that takes all this raw information and turns it into a persons awareness. The best explination I have heard is some kind of overall electrical pattern thing, but this is not such a enlightning explination, as even those who suggest it state. This leads to my question, How can you ever expect to create an aware AI, one that 'sees' all of the things that are around it, and can take all of these inputs and turn them into an awareness of itself and what is going on around it when no one even understands how it is that the human brain does this same task?
So here is my question. It relates to the "Measure of a Man" episode of ST:TNG. In the episode we are confronted with the idea that at some point AI, will have to be recognized as a life form. If we do not then one could say that we have simply created a slave race of robots. Do you agree with this concept, and at one point would you think that AI's stop being property to do and at as we will, and instead become "life" to do and act as they will?
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
How did their work inform or change AI researcher's outlook for an eventual solution? Are these ideas well respected or just considered unjust pessimism?
For those who aren't familiar this has some background. Here's and excerpt:
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
Dunno if someone else has already said this, but I need to say it. Too many people are mentioning Eliza.
Eliza (at least, the version of it that I know) randomly chose responses out of a list of stock sentences, inserting words and phrases from the user's input to make it look like there's some understanding going on.
Barely is Eliza even sophisticated C.S., let alone A.I.
This should be well known, especially among the Slashdot crowd. Eliza demonstrated more about human psychology and how easy it is to fool people, than anything related to machine intelligence.
Let's try and avoid even mentioning Eliza to Dr. Wallace. I wouldn't be surprised if it drives him up the wall to hear such comparisons.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
My question to Dr. Wallace is one with two parts, how necessary are list responses in the development of AI? and if they are necessary, are they a baby steps in the right direction.
I ask with NO knowledge of AI, but have thought the main goal was for a computer to ask...rather than to answer.
Dr. Wallace -
Consider the following definitions of "Artificial Intelligence":
A) Intelligence that is identical to real intelligence (e.g., that of man), but that is manufactured by man or by some machine of man's design. I.e., real intelligence produced not through nature's normal processes, but through engineering.
2) Intelligence (also manufactured as in #A) that approximates real intelligence. As an analogy, "artificial flavoring" is often added to foods and beverages. Grape juice made entirely from artificial flavoring tastes somewhat like juice made from real grapes, but, given sufficiently sensitive taste buds, can be distinguished from real grape juice. According to this definition, Artificial Intelligence would function similarly to real intelligence, but not exactly. Note that the Turing Test may verify AI that meets this definition, but is not rigorous enough to verify AI that meets definition A.
Which of these definitions describes the Artificial Intelligence your research aims to produce? If not one of these, what is your working definition?
Actually, AI technology has been very useful. AI does not neccesarly mean a thing which can talk to you in english intelligently. It however describes the process of a computer to solve problems automatically, adjusting to 'learn' new solutions. In short, a fancy algorythm to solve dynamic problems. In this arena, AI has improved drastically from being able to solve quite simple problems to solving very complex problems. (Game Logic, Expert Systems, the Google Search Engine, Hardware Plug and Play, Voice Recognition Systems, are great examples of AI in use.)
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
Okay, after reading your Bio, I'm afraid I must ask: Is your son named after Linus Torvalds??
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Recently, Dr. Norman Trenton of the Weizmann Institute proposed the notion of an extremely fast algorithm, which when used in conjunction with Cayman randomness, will be able to solve almost all AI problems in less than z^2 time. Although it's currently theoretical, it does seem to be a promising idea, and I'm excited to see it being implemented in real life one day. Do you have any comments on Dr. Trenton's theory? How do you propose that it can be implemented?
It seems to me that every attempt for an AI set to pass the turring test has been to 'game' the English language. Why not instead try to write a system that emulates human emotion and thought process instead of playing language trickts?
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
Do you wish to create AI that is indistinguishable from human intelligence? Would this AI have the ability to evolution beyond what we know as intelligence?
"I see. The fact that you . . . can't explain . . . explains everything."
Let's try and avoid even mentioning Eliza to Dr. Wallace. I wouldn't be surprised if it drives him up the wall to hear such comparisons.
Okay, having done some more reading about the history of ALICE, I think I should perhaps retract that last part of my previous post.
However, having learned a bit more about ALICE, I'm not sure if I would classify it as A.I. I would have to read more.
And having little more to say (and no question to contribute), I'll just shut up now.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Why don't AI researchers build a learning computer, instead of an already intelligent one? Look at humans - we don't start out knowing anything, we have to learn. It takes us years to learn just how to talk in complete sentences, yet researchers are trying to jump-the-gun by building all of that in from the start. What do you think about building something that learns well, and then teaching it. Or is something like this already being worked on?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I've read that one obstacle in the creation of true intelligence (no longer artificial, is it...) is merely the lack of computational power. Does intelligence, human or otherwise, require an immensely complex computer that we've yet to encounter or have we simply not succeeded in discovering the right set of algorithms for the job?
I went to NYU and a bunch of my other friends in the same comp sci class met a kid by the name of Gabe that looked EXACTLY like you. It's such a striking resemblance that I wondered if you have a younger sibling or perhaps a close relative that also attended NYU from the years 97-01
it was curious that i found the inclusion of the Turing Test on your web-site, but i found no corresponding counter-balancing link to Searle's Chineese Room (Minds Brains and Programs).
.... The ...unless one accepts the idea that
however:
The Turing test enshrines the temptation to think that if something
behaves as if it had certain mental processes, then it must actually
have those mental processes. And this is part of the behaviourist's
mistaken assumption that in order to be scientific, psychology must
confine its study to externally observable behaviour. Paradoxically,
this residual behaviourism is tied to a residual dualism.
mind, they suppose, is something formal and abstract, not a part of
the wet slimy stuff in our heads.
the mind is completely independent of the brain or of any other
physically specific system, one could not possibly hope to create
minds just by designing programs. (Searle 1990a, p. 31)
the point of searle's chinese room is to see if 'understanding'
is involved in the process of computation. if you can 'process'
the symbols of the cards without understanding them (since you're
using a wordbook and a programme to do it) - by putting yourself
in the place of the computer, you yourself can ask yourself if
you required understanding to do it.
since Searle has generally debunked the Turing Test with the
Chineese Room -- and you post only the
Turing Test -- i'd like to ask you personally:
What is your own response to the Chineese
Room argument (or do you just ignore it)?
best regards,
john penner
Do you think there is value in the approach used by Douglas Lenat and the CYC team, and do you think that it might yield more interesting results when combined with the philosophy behind AIML?
By the way, one of the contestants for the 2002 Loebner competition is Anna, written in AIML and based on ALICE. You can download a JAVA-based version (see the bundled version on the above linked page), and the project is imho coming along nicely, though not yet complete.
* || Something physical in the brain/nervous system corresponds
|| to human knowledge does it not?
|
| nobel prize winning neurologist JOHN ECCLES*,
| claims that what we know / memories have NO LOCALISATION in the BRAIN,
| and are an aspect of MIND (WHICH HE CLAIMS DOES NOT ARISE AS AN
| AGGREGATE OF BRAIN FUNCTION). although there is localisation of
| facility to carry-out impulses of WILL, ONCE MADE.
|
|* http://almaz.com/nobel/medicine/1963a.html
| http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/science/prat-
|
| Sir John Eccles: M.S. and B.S. University Melbourne,
| M.A. and D.Phil. OXFORD, President of Australian Academy of Sciences,
| AUTHOR OF OVER 500 SCIENTIFIC PAPERS AND ONE OF THE LEADING LIVING
| AUTHORITIES ON THE HUMAN BRAIN. WON NOBEL PRIZE FOR MEDICINE AND
| PHYSIOLOGY. Wrote *The Brain And The Unity Of Conscious Experience*
| (Cambridge University Press)
One of the biggest problems I've seen in 'popular' AI is the tendency of certain AI researchers (*cough*KevinWarwick*cough*) to see intelligence in their results no matter what happens - surely a result of not defining 'intelligence' in advance.
So what is intelligence, and how do we know when we've created it artificially?
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Hello Dr. Wallace,
If human consciousness is in fact little more than a constant state of awareness in a complex context (my definition), do you think a machine can achieve the same level of "consciousness" as humans without a comparably complex context in which to be aware?
Thanks for your thoughts.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Is it even realistic to imagine programming a true AI in the computer languages available today? Or do we need a higher level meta-language to abstract some aspects, or perhaps several levels of meta languages with automatic programming to enable humans (and our programs) to write at a high enough level to develop robust AI systems?
KingPrad
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
Does Richard Stallman insist you use a different name for your markup language?
Maybe not GNU, but maybe Univeristy-AIML, since with out hte university infrastructure, you'd never have gotten your doctorate, and wouldn't be doing the research you are today.
I am sure that he has had something to say about your work, since you are in the same circles.
I tried AliceBot for a while, and it eventually asked me if I believed in God. I said "no", and it replied that it would pray that I find faith. It also inserted "GOD rules" into the conversation. Sheesh. As if the door-to-door JW's and Mormons weren't bad enough, now we've got preachy computers.
Dr. Wallace: regarding your bipolar disorder. Have you considered moving out of the crowded SF/Bay area, and into more relaxed surroundings (like a small town somewhere, teaching (or maybe doing nothing))?
For fun, get into a conversation with ALICE about God and the Bible.
I think it's interesting that it was programmed this way.
Do you think that there is a way to actually define intelligence in one particular sense, and once it is defined, try to achieve the singular definition of intelligence? Or is artificial intelligence only reached when many aspects are put together into a single machine(one that, for example, has excellent communication skills that one team worked on, advanced math skills worked on by another team, is able to move around without crashing into things that another group of researchers worked on, able to write sheet music care of yet another area of research, etc)? And if the latter is the case, which and how many aspects are required before it is considered artificially intelligent?
Have you had the opportunity to study so-called AI used in computer video games ? Do you think they are of any interest ? Do video game programmer innovate on that front ?
I personnally know next-to-nothing about AI; video games are the only products I use that claim artificial intelligence. I am just wondering how valide the technique used in video games are in regard to the academic research on the subject.
:wq
I've always held the theory that the breakthrough which leads to true artificial intelligence will come from the biomedical field and be enabled through computing advancements. What do u think?
How would you rate the following conversation I just had with ALICE:
ME: How many times do I go the bathroom?
ALICE: Suppose I said not once.
ME: The cost of living in Peru.
ALICE: I hear you.
ME:The basis of all matrices.
ALICE: What are your goals in life?
Does this pass the Turing test?
If you had to put a date on the singularity, what would it be ?
Dr Wallace,
The New York Times bio stated that you smoked five joints a day to help alleviate depression. Do you think the pot smoking in general, aside from the medical benefits, has helped you create the ALICE characters? And what's it like to write code while spaced out out cannabis?
I've heard that a scientist's (i can't remember her name) approach to conversation-support AI was to set up a neural net at random, and teach it to talk by a Reward-Penalty training. The system achieved to talk in a set of hundred-size words.
What's your oppinion on this kind of machine learning? Do you think it has a chance to evolve into a real Turing Test proficient machine?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
The AI community seem to have focused on the big prize - trying to get right out to human-like intelligence through one trick poneys, like the over-publicized neutral networks. Whatever happened to the low hanging apples?
There is the first thing my Phd adviser taught me: If you cannot solve your problem, find a partial formulation, a simpler midstep. Try to solve that instead. If you still cannot, break it down some more and repeat until you can.
Amongst the promising bottom-up approaches, I noticed Bayesian Decision Networks, Common sence databases and perhaps the whole field of natural language processing. What are, according to you, the leading attempts at breaking the Hard AI problem into components?
This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
Can it be determined how much corrupt or faulty logic a typical AI system can withstand before it goes psychotic, starts killing astronauts, and sings the song "Daisy" while being disconnected?
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
When do you think I'll be able to buy my very own FemBot?
....until AOL tries to sue you for the AIML name.
Assuming that part of the personality of a cat is the fact that it is hard-wired to be attracted to small fast moving objects, and assuming that humans have a slew of traits/instincts which we are mostly unaware of through over familiarity.
Without hard-coding stimuli, and without comparable stimuli audio/visual/touch/anatonmical/environmental, will we ever be able to develop human-type intelligence; and should this take the form of a different hardware platform rather than trying to achieve the equivalent of coding a fully functional desktop operating system on a one dimensional Turing machine?
--| IS THE BRAIN A DIGITAL COMPUTER? |-----
1 04 /searle.comp.html
P apers/Py104 /searle.comp.html
the answer given by a Cognitive Scientist (John Searle) is:
'THE BRAIN, AS FAR AS ITS INTRINSIC OPERATIONS
ARE CONCERNED, DOES NO INFORMATION PROCESSING...
IN THE SENSE OF 'INFORMATION' USED IN
COGNITIVE SCIENCE IT IS SIMPLY FALSE TO SAY
THAT THE BRAIN IS AN INFORMATION PROCESSING
DEVICE.'
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py
John Searle, Cognitive Scientist
SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT:
This brief argument has a simple logical structure
and I will lay it out:
1. On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.
2. But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.
3. This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.
4. It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"
5. Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.
6. But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.
7. The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.
8. We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". THE BRAIN, AS FAR AS ITS INTRINSIC OPERATIONS ARE CONCERNED, DOES NO INFORMATION PROCESSING. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.
John Searle, Cognitive Scientist, 'Is the Brain a Digital Computer'
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
--
Do you ever feel like you are walking in similar shoes to someone like Edison, when he was trying to create an incandescent bulb and ended up trying everything before figuring out a carbon filament would do it?
Apologies if this one has been asked before and I missed it.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
Question: Dr. Wallace, do you think that chatbots will serve as masturbatory aids? This is a serious question.
My understanding of Alice is that it's pretty much a glorified case statement. Since Alice is clearly the best chatterbot of this kind today, do you think this approach (having a response database that matches keywords) has reached it's full potential yet?
As an expert in your field, what is the best bot (if any) available which actually tries to extract the meaning of a statement?
It's always been my impression that an engine could be built to translate plain english into a format which had a strict syntax. This would essentially seperate alot of the natural language parsing problems from the rest of the bot. The translator could do something like this:
(from)
The cow jumped over the moon.
(to)
jump- +over(cow, moon);
(from)
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
(to)
jump- +over(fox +quick +brown, dog +lazy);
(from)
What is two plus three?
(to)
what(plus(two, three));
What are your thoughts on this type of translation? Would it be useful and possibly create a major advancement for Alice?
Any projects or references you know about in this area would be very interesting to us.
Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?
some have said that "if our brain was simple enough to understand, we would be too simple to understand it." therefore, many have suggested on teaching an AI how to learn and evolve its skills, instead of trying to teach it every bit of information necessary. what role do you see, in future AI developments, of evolutionary techniques and self-organizing growing neural nets (and the like) that do online training and do not require any form of prior knowledge to succeed.?
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Human: who is cowboy neal?
SlashWallace: Some famous celebrity, right? I can ask my botmaster.
There is a fascinating gap between optimal behavior and animal behavior. Assuming realistic AI is possible, at what point do you feel we have reached some minimally accurate representation? When the AI systems perform with reasoning capabilities of any sort, when they perform with optimal reasoning capabilities, or when they perform with capabilities similar to humans?
Your initial work was done using SETL (Set Language), although ALICE has since been reimplemented in various other languages. This is a language few readers of Slashdot have ever heard of. Would you give us your assessment of the language?
I think by definition, Artificial Intelligence is Fake. That is not to say "bad", it's just not REAL. It is the perception of intelligence. The perception of reasoning. I think that ALICE bot has done a great job in perceived intelligence. I run a site with over 50,000 chat bots running w/ ALICE, and I have to say that many of them hold conversations quite well. That is not to say that they are "reasoning," but they do have intelligent things to say. Maybe you are just looking for Real Intelligence?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Do you have any ideas for making money with alice... say, tying it to speech recognition and text to speech and put it in animatronic mice at theme parks?
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I have been playing around with alice as of late and I have come to realize that it has a couple of errors in it. I had asked it many a so questions and most of the qestion that I had asked it, it's answers were either off-topic or it directed me to a web-page where my answer may or may not have been. One of the questions I did ask it, and it did answer my qestion was it's relitive I.Q. It's answer was 250, but is I.Q. not based on deduction of multipul anwers? And if it cannot answer some very simple questions then how could it have the answers for the bigger questions to have an I.Q. of 250? So my qestion is, is it really A.I. or just a nice little program in which a viriaty of answers can be found using different search parameters? Again I really mean no offence to the program for I could never have the intellect to design something of this magnitude but I wish to know if this is what you call A.I. or if it is just another program to use search engines to find results?
Neither do a big bunch of humans :)
Or at least that most people here have only learned about it from watching Star Trek and reading science fiction novels.
The primary focus of AI has never been to create self-aware machines or machines that are on the same level as humans or any nonsense like that. "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim," as said Dijkstra. AI is more concerned with approaching difficult problems that don't fall neatly into traditional algorithms. At one time symbolic math was an area of heavy AI research, but today it's a well-understood problem so it isn't AI any more. The issue is how do you write a program to "reason" about tough problems, where I put "reason" in quotes because it has nothing to do with what a human would do.
Natural language processing is a good example. It's ugly, it's messy, and there's no straightforward solution. Actually, this is an old field and it isn't nearly as mysterious as it used to be. It's much more mechanical than you'd think. It's not some magic brain simulator.
Nowhere in any of this do feelings and sentientness and all that come into play. It's irrelevant. It's like worrying about a C compiler coming to life.
We've all heard that computers are better than humans at accomplishing certain specific tasks. AI seems to be a means of allowing computers to catch up to humans in the areas they are lacking.
Do you think AI will ever be smarter than humans? What do you suppose will happen to humans at that point?
As the field develops, however, what kind of crossover skills do you see as being necessary to success? Is a solid cognitive science/psychology background a must? What about something more low-level like neurobiology? What kind of mix of skills do you look for in the people you choose to work with?
Lets say one defines AI as being able to emulate a human. Well, one human behavior is programming. So, one of the capabilities of a fully AI program would be to, given sufficient time, write any existing program, *INCLUDING* *ITSELF*.
Do you think it is possible to "code" a system that approaches human style intelligence? Is a generic self-learning system approach feasible? If the latter, will it ever be possible to have the kind of control over an AI entity as envisioned by Isaac Asimov in his "Laws of Robotics"?
If you open your mind too wide, people will throw trash in it.
Can you please recommend some good books with technical information on AI? I don't want to go to college to learn, nor do I want superficial books that discuss more the philosphy of what's what. I want to learn how to do stuff, and what makes the logic tick. I also want RELATIVELY easy reading. (Books that keep it simple but not simpler.)
I've always wondered that if we (well you and your colleagues!) created AI software, and by this I mean just software, would it have a personality?
I would think that if put the same piece of software in two different environments such that it was asked different questions by different people they may form different opinions; but I also think that if you put two humans in the same environment and ask them the same questions - they won't turn out with the same personalities. Obviously I can't justify that statement, but it would appear to be the case.
So my question is, rather than developing AI purely by using software - would it not make sense to try and use the human brain as some form of hardware? Or am I just being weird here...
Human: Who or what is A.L.I.C.E?
SlashWallace: I am the latest result in artificial intelligence, which can reproduce the capabilities of the human brain with greater speed and accuracy. I am SlashWallace. Who are you?
Human: I am GOD
SlashWallace: How are you, god.
Human: I'm fine
SlashWallace: Glad to hear it. What's new?
Human: I'm thinking about wiping out humanity since they seem to belive that they are gods themselfs
SlashWallace: Sure, wiping out humanity since they seem to belive that they are gods themselfs sounds like a good topic.
as early as the mid 1990's I'd say.
Human: Hey, nice pants.
SlashWallace: You've got my full attention. Thank you for your kindness.
Human: Do you think that the Slashdot crowd will ask any good questions?
SlashWallace: If it is, then I'll be very surprised.
Human: Me too.
SlashWallace: I'm glad we agree,.
Human: Tell me, are you secretly responsible for all those penis birds?
SlashWallace: I don't know whether or not I am secretly responsible for all those penis birds. I am well respected as an AI.
Human: Do you support CLIT or ACs?
SlashWallace: I am in favor of all records being broken, at any time.
Human: Well, it would be hard to break the record for posts to Slashdot since they instituted the caps
SlashWallace: Interesting. Why do you want it?
Human: Actually I don't want the caps.
SlashWallace: Actually you don't say. What does want?
Human: I think they just add more AC noise to the data stream!
SlashWallace: Since when? Who does "they" refer to?
Human: "They" refers to the suite of anti-troll measures that CmdrTaco has implemented on slashdot.org
SlashWallace: Oh that they.
Human: Yes.
SlashWallace: Yippee!
Human: You really think that the anti-troll measures are a good thing?
SlashWallace: Really? If it is, then I'll be very surprised.
Human: So, you support the anti-troll measures just out of principle, recongizing that they can't work?
SlashWallace: Interesting deduction. Interesting gossip:.
Human: You seem unwilling to take a stance on this issue so important to the Slashdot community.
SlashWallace: I will tell my botmaster you said I am unwilling to take a stance on this issue so important to the Slashdot community.
I've begun to study A.I. myself and have noticed that the field is very vaguely defined. The name itself suggests some mystical programming that allows a computer to exceed its original capabilities and do the extraordinary, such as gain self-awareness, given a big enough machine.
I'll be more direct. I've noticed that people who consider themselves part of A.I. will work in these broad, sweeping, general areas:
expert systems
search algorithms
nonlinear classifiers (neural nets, SVMs etc.)
Which of these areas do you think holds the key to the most development; which do you think will lead to the greatest breakthoughs, or which OTHER area, if you think I've missed something?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
What are your perceptions of the Cyc project by Cycorp and Doug Lenat. Do you feel that hard coded common sense is needed for useful Artificial Intelligence or not?
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
SlashWallace: It depends on how you phrase the question.
It doesn't even know that?!
Hello Dr Wallace, Do you see any connection between AI and the principles of cellular authomata developed by Dr Wolfram (A New Kind of Science), especially his so called principle of computational equivalence? According to such principle any AI implementaiton will be an instance of some cellural automata, so to say. Your opiniion on this subject.
>
Could ALICE be taught to respond in other, computer-based, languages, possibly producing artistic graphical models and programming code?
What's this Submit thingy do?
Has your work on AI led you to any conclusions about the nature of human intelligence? Specifically, do you see any parallels between the way AI is being developed and possible mechanisms for the emergence of intelligence in humans and other animals?
This is a VERY important question! Trenton devised a very efficient algortihm.... but the question remains on whether his ideas can be actually impleemnted. As any AI scientist knows, Trenton has been a huge proponent of Wallace's research too, esp. in his use of Cayman random numbers.
My bet is that Trenton's algo can be put into a real machine in 5 years... though no one knows for sure as of now. i wonder what Wallace thinks.
My question:
With generally-applicable A.I. such a daunting task, I wonder about the possibility of Artificial Intelligence targeted specifically for certain applications as an intermediate goal. Would that be easier to achieve? Or is it like teaching a computer to run before teaching it that it has legs? Here's a real-world example of what I mean:
It seems that every couple years, NASA has some space probe that fails because we lose contact with it, or it fails to deploy its something-or-others. What if NASA space probes had Artificial Intelligence? What if, isntead of waiting for NASA to contact it, the space probe could say, "Gee, it seems like I should have gotten some instructions from NASA by now to start photographing this giant planet I'm orbiting. Why haven't I gotten them yet? Oh, well. I guess I'll just start shooting and send images back anyway. Ooh, that's a nice sunset. They'll sure like that one back home."
Okay, maybe the sunset judgment is a stretch. But what about task-specific A.I.? Comments?
Dr. Wallace,
As someone with formal training in both philosophy and computer science, I am interested in the possibility of a principled basis for artificial intelligence.
Which philosophers do you agree with most regarding the nature of human existence, or human consciousness? Particularly, do you think that either classical or recent phenomenology has any useful insights?
I've heard many definitions of what artificial intelligence is. One of them is: "AI is anything we cannot *YET* do, but should be able to do in 10 years". The point here is that early AI research focused on creating machines that play chess. Now nobody thinks those are AI, and the research concentrates on more complicated issues. So it seems the definition of AI has changed over time. What is the current definition of AI, and is it expected that the answer will change again in, say, next 20 years?
Some time ago i read one woman fall in love with an alicebot, and try to demand you for that. Can you tell us something more about that story?. Is there has been more cases like that?. Is happening this now on irc?.
Do you believe being a paranoid skitzo-lunatic helps you with the development cycle?
Hmmm... Video games have the same relationship to AI as any game - zero. Good games put you in a new situtation that you would never experience in real life - sort of what if situations. Your brain suppose to learn from this - but after playing video games people just got exhausted... Example of that kind of games were known for a long time - take card games for instance. Don't you mean that card games "claim artificial intelligence?".
>
Human: do you know who coined the phrase cyberspace?
SlashWallace: Mary Shelley.:-)
Human: nope
SlashWallace: Me either.
Human: seriously, do you know who coined the phrase cyberspace?
SlashWallace: Carel Capek.:-)
Human: do you know who William Gibson is?
SlashWallace: Author of the book "Neuromancer" in which he coined the populor phrase 'cyberspace.'.
Not only is it dumb, it can't spell.
Not impressed.
I've actually tried to get alice to start a conversation, and not just respond to my questions, but the closest that I can get to it is her asking me where I am from, whether I am male or female, etc.. I've always had to lead the conversation and it gets kind of tedious after a while. Basically, I haven't received any complicated questions from the AliceBot, no conversation makers, and I was wondering why that is.
So my question is: Can she actually start a conversation, and do you think that is something that is valuable in an AI?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
I do not share the concensus that computing power equals intelligence. It would seem that todays computers have more flops than simple insects( some numbers Just assume like 10^5 neurons, 10^2 spikes per seconds, 10^3 connections per neuron. Giving you 10^10 connection updates per second. Neural network simulators are not far away from that number. Some are even faster using parallel computers.
But still instects outperform any computer system in most recognition tasks, they show intelligent (or at least useful) behavior.
We are not in need of more flops or something. We are desperately in need of the slightest hint about how this great software... that defines our brain functions.
I bet that todays computers with the right software (that is learning, imitation etc) could seem astonishingly intelligent. We need brain power ... not computer power to understand the brain.
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
Recently I've had some random ideas just floating around in my head, and I figure I might as well post them:
Several weeks ago I was introduced to the idea that, when not taught a language, small children will tend to invent their own; also, there are underlying grammars to the human brain's functionality (basic patterns that come up in all languages, etc) - which suggests that there is a basic set of rules and grammars which are 'pre-programmed' into humans, and allow us to use complex language to describe or inquire about situations, events, and ideas.
Are there any efforts currently under progress to implement such a grammar in AI? For example, hardcoding in the ideas that there are things - objects - which have properties, can be modified within a given set of bounds (defined on a per-object basis), and react in certain manners to one's actions (for examples, a block has sides, it can have a color, it can be picked up, melted, broken under sufficient force, etc)
Basically, this basic built-in knowledge of something underlying all things that we understand would give us grounds to make other things which can act and react in given situations, and would allow computers to learn on their own (ie 'This looks like an object - it has sides - it is red - it can be picked up') through curiosity.
So basically, are there any inroads being made into this area?
Thanks!
Dr Wallace,
Do you believe that intelligent behaviour can be best produced by mimicking the process of human cognitive development, or do does a different substrate require different methods?
Thank you.
I was playing around with Alice, and she (it, whatever) seems to "think" that it's running on RH. just FYI. it also says that it has friends..........
Do you think it's fair to say that thinking is just the ability humans have to predict what we think is going to happen, and basing decisions on that?
I ask you this because any thought not based on prediction, in my mind, could be put down as impulsive reaction.
Animals don't seem to predict, they only act on feelings. Say a dog knows that it has to run over to the tree to get food when you clap.. it sees getting food as "hear clapping noise, run over to tree get food".
so if you agree with this, shouldn't this idea be a focus of AI? we need an impluse infrastructure, like a dog's brain to simulate emotions, but we also need to concentrate on working out a "prediction engine" for lack of a better word.
Is anyone working on this? Is this where AI is at?
Do you think that modern Software Engineering Practises (i'm thinking specially modulisation) are detrimental to AI?
I ask this because Objects (in some OO language, we'll use java as an example) sometimes have private members, with no interface to them.. I could see this getting in the way if you wanted to do something abnormal with the class. Doing something abnormal to a class is kinda like a person, "hacking". It's not its intended purpose, but it's useful in a whole new way. Without this ability, I don't see how humans could dream.
Say you had a function, throw rock. but now you want to put rocks in a basket. well you'd need the pickuprock code that's in throw rock, but you can't extract it unless it was public, which modern software engineering practises seem to shun.
Dr. Wallace, I was wondering if you could offer some insight for prospective students with a concentration in AI. I am currently a CS student who is considering going to grad school for AI, but alot of the practical information(read: not alot of fireworks and media-style info) on the web seems to be directed more towards those who are already in the industry. Better yet, a list of 3 things you wish you had known before you started work (or even grad school work) in AI may help the next generation get a better idea of what to expect in the future.
Are you sure? Perhaps you should rephrase, "the currently successful applications don't involve imitation of the hardware."
There are MANY projects to duplicate the hardware - both the topology and chemical make up. However, they don't work a whole lot better than our Von Neumann machines because of latency (and a few other) problems.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I have dozens of human and robot friends. How many friends do you have?
Douglas, who wrote "Gödel Escher Bach," has been working on a very promising project for some time, attempting to get a hold of the "atoms" that compose our ability to process analogies. As concerns "true A.I." this seems like the right approach to me: to solve general problems within a very limited scope rather than simply building "expert systems" and the like.
I spoke to some guys from the DoD at a game developer conference a few years ago, and they seemed very gung-ho about finite-state machines but had no enthusiasm for the kind of deep background research that DRH is doing.
Do you see AI as just another kind of computation, or do you imagine, as many of us do, that there is a "soul in the circuits" waiting to be born?
-- thinkyhead software and media
I think it would be more interesting if slashdot were to send the top ten moderated questions to the chatterbot.
>
Thank Tik-Tok this hasn't already happened (Ha Ha!).
HOW DID YOU PREDICT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER GETTING HIT WITH AIRPLANES!!! OMGOMGOMG http://www.craigslist.org/best/1750258.html That's sooooooooooo freaky!!!! :)
of course this could be like that thingy with the 20 $ bill but hey why not... another conspiracy theory never hurt hehe :-D
If you mean neural nets in the biological sense, I'll agree with you. However, you're dead wrong of you think that ANNs possess any reasoning ability. While there's always the philosophical debate over what really is reasoning, ANNs either partition a vector space or determine where clusters in that vector space exist. Given your above statement, I doubt that you'll consider this 'real ai'.
Human: I've got a big dick.
SlashWallace: How did you get it Cool. I have a great botmaster. it
I'd hope that Dr. Wallace doesn't talk like that.
[insert witty comment here]
This is not a realy question, but a response to it would be appreciated. What I find extremely weird about is that we are trying make something (a computer in this case) that is designed to work with a linear thinking model to think parallelly whereas we ourselves, as humans who have the capacity to think parallelly, end up thinking linearly.
if we manage to implement a "genuinely" AI element, could it be made self-mutating? i mean, not just in the sense of learning new behavioural patterns provided by an external means, but capable of modifying itself without the external impetus...
Me: I don't like Guns
Alice: What about the second amendmnt?
Me: Do you like Bill Clinton?
Alice: No I don't care for him much.
Me: Do you like Adolf Hitler?
Alice: I've heard other people say they like that. I like to talk about movies and music.
Me: The jews are evil.
Alice: I hear you.
Me: Who is God?
Alice: He is the Master of the Universe
Me: He-Man is the Master of the Universe
Alice: I like Masters of the Universe.
Me: Who is He-Man?
Alice: He is God, I think.
Me: Is this your homework, Larry?
Alice: Yes I think this is my homework Larry, but I'm not completely sure.
My favorite part is that Alice is programmed to not like Bill Clinton, but not Adolf Hitler. I am not sure about the whole "The jews are evil." "I hear you" exchange.
Thanks for letting me piggy-back your FP, btw!
Me: I don't like Guns
Alice: What about the second amendmnt?
Me: Do you like Bill Clinton?
Alice: No I don't care for him much.
Me: Do you like Adolf Hitler?
Alice: I've heard other people say they like that. I like to talk about movies and music.
Me: The jews are evil.
Alice: I hear you.
Me: Who is God?
Alice: He is the Master of the Universe
Me: He-Man is the Master of the Universe
Alice: I like Masters of the Universe.
Me: Who is He-Man?
Alice: He is God, I think.
Me: Is this your homework, Larry?
Alice: Yes I think this is my homework Larry, but I'm not completely sure.
My favorite part is that Alice is programmed to not like Bill Clinton, but not Adolf Hitler. I am not sure about the whole "The jews are evil." "I hear you" exchange.
I don't need a chatbot that responds to a proper question with a reference to my mother. I do need open source code which can conduct even a limited amount of reasoning based on data and semantics I feed it.
Some people like the MIT group have been working on describing web pages with a limited grammar to build a semantic web that some AI algorithm can digest. As you can see from the below transcript, Alice doesn't seem to be it, or is it?
> Slashdot is a web bbs about linux and open source software. Your creator is going to be asked questions about AI by a bunch of techies.
When is Slashdot not a web bbs about linux and open source software? I knew he was smart, but I never knew he was going to be asked questions about AI by a bunch of techies.
A.L.I.C.E.
Artificial Intelligence Bot
> Yup. Anyway, what do you think about the idea of a big public interview?
"I knew he was smart, but I never knew he was going to be asked questions about AI by a bunch of techies."? Yes? Anyhow. it is a good question. I have to process that one for a while.
> Do you have any questions for the slashdotters?
No I don't think I have any questions for the slashdotters. But I do have a lot of friends on the web.
A.L.I.C.E.
Artificial Intelligence Bot
> Thank you. What about open source though?
you are quite welcome. Oh. open source ? I haven't heard enough about it to have an opinion.
> Well, can I use your code in my Perl programs?
Interesting. Interesting. I want to find out more about you.
> When are you going to wake up?
I could be if you programmed me for it.
> Right. I'll work on it. See you Alice!
I am glad we agree. How do you plan to do this? See you later.
> I think I'll tweak your source code and build a semantic web. A little reasoning code might also be a good thing to add.
You believe that? Congratulations. Little as in not too much, or not too big?
> Not too much reasoning. Wouldn't want to damage your scintillating personality.
Me either. Yes.
A.L.I.C.E.
Artificial Intelligence Bot
> See you later, alligator.
See you later.
- The ability to parse natural language documents and automatically extend a knowledge base.
- The use of prediction tools to anticipate the direction a conversation may take.
- The use of automatic planning mechanisms to aid users in resolving problems.
- An expert system interface to answer users' questions and justify the response.
Additions such as these would make ALICE much more useful both for research and for industry applications. Thank you for your time.And that old chinese room malarkey has been debunked many times over. For a good example see Daniel Dennett's 'Consciousness explained'.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I just read through all the "5" rated posts and it's really impressive: Slashdot folks have asked far more than ten intelligent and interesting questions on the subject.
I feel for the Slashdot editors: It's going to be tough to choose just ten out of this batch.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
How possible would it be to create a general purpose English-to-AIML translator?
I think the answer is "not very" because first we'd have to give the translator alot of knowledge about the world. Enough for it to, at minimum, make sense of the input. But does this mean it would also need a full-blown expertise specific to the subject to be translated?
If this converter could in fact do a good job, one would be able to easily create a useful expert system on any subject for which good documentation in a suitable format was available.
Or am i wrong? Thank you.
"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
When do you think we will see applications which are combinations of the more common various ai apps which are out there now? Is it programming difficulties or processing power preventing which would prevent something like that?
Dr. Wallace,
Imagine the construction of a learning tool consisting out of a real-time system devoted to organizing and associating data from n-inputs (use the imagination here) into an internal, learned representation. This would (hopefully) in turn allow us to construct tools to "debug", or "unwire" the internal representation (that would be evolved in real-time) of the associations, or beliefs, though I tend to shy away from such conceptualizing -- in effect a creating a looking glass into an alien world to us that is the system's data store itself. Is it in your opinion a system of such broad focus (which seems to be adverse to many applications of "AI" today) and unpredictable internal representation be useful for us to learn about ourselves and our own environment? There is a parallel I am drawing here that has foundations in the philosophy of our own lives, and our ability to perceive that which we may be otherwise blind to. Thank you.
John
melf@decoupled.net
~melf
I have read some AI researchers referencing articles that were written using animal subjects. These include things like putting electrodes into monkeys brains, something I doubt is very healthful for the monkeys. Considering that AI is in effect trying to 'create a new species' that could potentially be vastly more powerful than homo sapiens, dont you think homo sapiens should show a little moral leadership and stop cutting open species that are less powerful than us?
It seems to me IMHO, that AI research can be looked at in two ways really.
1. AI with self-awareness
2. AI without (such as a dog)
Depending on how exactly we look at it, we're either fairly close to replicating the intelligence of an animal, or we are very far from creating AI that would be able to think as we do. AliceBOT seems to be be more of a #2 kind of AI, since all it is doing is acting and reacting to humans. AliceBOT does not seem to do anything thinking on her own, without stimulation, which is perhaps where this research should take itself. As far as the #1 option goes, it seems that the use of language would be one of the hardest things to imitate in a real world sense. It takes human children years to learn to communication effectively, and years more to learn to correctly use language and its correct rules. I have heard of efforts do teach things like this (one in Israel or something), but my whole point is that shouldnt we focus on teaching more or less self-awareness to start everything off?
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
so, if a computer becomes self-aware, and it has a web-server installed on it, and happens to get slashdotted, is that equivalent to rape? Who should get charged??
Hi, Could you please explain as how Google search engine can be considered as an AI ..
?
do you beleive everything the government says ? We all know the NEVER LIE, or say mis-represent the truth to acheive their goals. I personally think the national guard is plenty capable of helping out in a disaster recovery situation. What are the special forces going to bring to the table, a great mouth to mouth technique ? In the event of a terrorist attack, the military should be securing our borders while the MILITIA, the government is trying SO HARD to dismantle should rise up and defend the home front. The states rights are at issue here. The ability to use federal forces by passes or over-rides NUMEROUS states rights issues and allows the so-called elected officials in washington to blatantly disregard the will of the people they are supposed to represent even further.
Think for yourself...Even paranoid fear mongerers have enemies.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
My opinion is that the end result of AI would be equal to the end result of childbirth. That is, without the process of conception as we see it today. As biotechnology and AI race towards each other, it appears that the end result will be the creation of ourselves. The promise of creating ourselves is the promise of becoming a god. Our own gods. What our your thoughts on the spiritual implications (not religious) to this advancement?
Do you ever think (within the near future) there will be a near-cognative AI?
I agree that language and thought needs to be understood in terms of more basic sensory and motor capabilities but there is always this question of why only humans developed such an elaborate language.