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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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."
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
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
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?
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?
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.
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?
or in that vein, artificial sense of humor?
love is just extroverted narcissism
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 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?
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.
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.
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
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...
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
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
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.)
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
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 &
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.
"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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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
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?
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
....until AOL tries to sue you for the AIML name.
--| 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/
--
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?
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.
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?
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!
I'm not exactly sure what these have to do with _AI_. And if you don't know, there is also Common Lisp. Scheme is also not Common Lisp. Take any language out today and none of them meets all of the criteria you listed fully. And if they do or did.. how would that help AI?
As for guile "failing".. well I'm still using it and there was talk of The GIMP using it rather than Scheme in one defun (siod). IMO, the only set-back or problem with guile was them developing on top of SCM and not starting from scratch. Now their code base is completely incoherent and unmaintainable (IMO, of course).
Dijkstra Considered Dead
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.
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?
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?
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!
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.
>
um. nearly every Scheme/Lisp/_Python_ is not related to AI: Why? Perhaps because AI is still very much a research project, and not some real world application. Which is why you don't need CORBA, etc. support built into the language. And if you do, you can always add it to just about any language (Lisp-like languages especially). I think you're just looking for reasons to bash Lisp-like languages..
BTW, Python and Perl are pretty much tied to a _program_ as of right now. They aren't cross-platform until you port the Python application (the "system"). CL/R5RS you can grab the specification and implement it. The cross-platform issue is completely moot.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
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.
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!
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.
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 ?