Also, these moves, which can be equated to "experience", is often fed to the computer by a human.
Modern techniques often uses a mix of random chance, adaption, human fed experience, statistical experience etc.
Hence it'll play "humanly", it'll play "ruley", it'll play "alien"... Maybe that can be concidered "computery". But there is overlaps with humans in the "humanly" department, and if humans study statistically proven moves, then there's more... Etc.
It is mathematically proven to be unsolveable within finite time, as the problem is in class NP.
BUT, within AI, the latest techniques most probably always wins over a human with a statistical significance that could be concidered "solved". (Albeit, for purity, I think it should always be concidered unsolveable - almost always, and always are two different things, even in infinity)
- AI geek
(Btw, Deep Blue is ANCIENT, it used rule-based AI ffs)
It is an industry that brings in revenue that rivals all the other software companies.
Maybe learn how to make games. That'll make you able to work in any industry. I ended up in banking doing advanced financial modes - with a mathematrical base in 3D graphics/AI, eg. advanced linear algebra, set, number and computational theory. It is trivial stuff compared making to games 8)
I tried that in the beginning, but as the other boys grew, they became increasingly voilent and physically imposing.
Teachers thought my parents was beating me, when they saw me at gym. But the wounds and the scars was from the boys in my class. That just made it worse.
It was impossible to avoid the assaults while participating in school activities, so I stopped coming after a period.
It didn't help that I was physically unimposing, effiminate and revealed in having a relationship with another boy. (Which was removed from the school afterwards and rescued from evil homosexuality, while I got to stay and take the hate)
I got no advice actually. Suicide seems a real option to many, and I've known people who chose that solution. But somehow I managed to keep on going.
I find it hard to believe these fluffy initiatives against bullying. In my opinion kids are raised wrongly. In my opinion the expected behaviour of genders are erronous. It is evident in what other posts; they hit back. Thus they participate in a voilent culture, a culture some, including me, are not able to participate in.
Of course you'll run into problems if only hunting is banned.
More must be done, such as proper enclosures, forest street crossings et cetera, and it must determined how the local animal live travels such that traffic can be reconfigured to support it.
To support ethical human suburban and urban life, that lifestyle must be fundamentally changed.
The good solutions are more than often a lot more expensive than the bad, and requires active effort from people. That's why the bad almost always win sadly.
I learned the engineering parts at work. I'm even instructing now.
Didn't want to waste time studying how to actually do things. That's a waste of time. I learn how to do that while doing it:-) Learning theory is not easy to learn by doing however.
"The Swedish prison system is not generally severe. The emphasis is on humanitarian treatment of prisoners and rehabilitation. Sentences are generally short and prisoners enjoy a high material standard." ~ wikipedia
They are torturing him. They do the same to anarchists in Scandinavia.
Why do you even have trust in systems anymore? It is a long time since the law worked. If you're a problem, you'll be marked something that voids your rights, and you'll be prosecuted regardless.
Use the $35 for a safe encrypted proxy and ignore the police states interference in your private e-life.
Or save up for a lawyer. It's better to hide from big brother than to let it gather data on you however. It'll use it in any unfair way it can.
The data is hardly ever identical, and that can be troublesome when it comes to DB2 binding. The size an be cause performance issues. Most fun part is when less condiderate developers bind to empty tables. Many laughs are had when the business looses several millions on escalating deadlocks:-)
But usually it is the developers who mess up. Mess up program and library versions between environments et cetera.
I work in a core dep., so I often work on libraries - and it happens that people build dependencies in SYST with them and move to PROD. That is entirely their fault, because they did not do the necessary analysis. The PROD guys did their job fine as well; everything compiled. The interfaces just doesn't match up and memory is flinged erronously all around the mainframe.:( Then I have to clean stuff up.
I'd like a four layered system, with TEST, SYSTTEST, PREPROD and PROD - where PREPROD is a place identical to PROD only used to determine if moved packaged can run with the correct return codes. (Not just a compilation and bind success) Then a final move can be done.
SYSTTEST is not a safe place, because while it is not for development per say, it is still a place where volatile code resides.
It is called detailed design, and is the design of a system. Tests are even performed at that level to see if it works. Without any code yet - it has not yet been constructed.
When you pour a hundred million into a product, and involve hundreds of programmers, this better damn work. This can be the killer of even large corporations.
I already create working A.I. thank you very much. I do not want to sell it though, so I keep it as data points:-)
But then again I was a designer once. I abandoned it to become a computer scientist and lead developer.
I dream now more than ever.
So design may have helped. I can visualize whole systems before I create them and solve problems of overwhelming size.
There are some programmers who do not visualize and dream as much, but do stuff based on requirements. But you must remember that there are difference in programmers. I am a lead programmer; I do much more than write trivial letters complying to some grammer of a language.
Why would you want computer science educations to teach programming languages? That is a waste of time.
Learn the students the fundamentals of the science, have them understand the Turing machine.
Then have them practise all the algorithms by doing it in any language they choose. Perhaps require them to change language for each assignment.
I can do COBOL, PL/1, JAVA, C, C++, C#, Python, EGL and others that I can't even remember to mention. My employer do not hire based on what languages you can, but your knowledge of the principles/science. Anybody can learn how to develop in any language on any system if they know how systems works in theory.
I do recommend that you employ hackers. We may come in a leather jackets with tatoos and piercings. But take those of us who got a masters or PHd; there's plenty of us. Just dont act up all cocky, we got plenty of jobs. Give us pay and let us do our thing.
I see no problem. The market is moving towards a situation where trades are handled by automatic systems. Those who can or will not adapt will loose, and the system will eventually stabilize again until new first movers in advantagous techniques emerges.
I cannot believe in what is current. Everything is ever changing. I will always adapt and prosper.
000001 */2/ THERE IS NO PROBLEM WITH CAPITAL LETTERS
000002 */2/ WHAT IS NEEDED IS 16 COLOURS TO HIGHLIGHT
000003 */2/ THE SHORTCUT LETTERS FOR THE TERMINAL
000004 */2/ COMMANDS!
Well, I do not care. I work on a Mainframe:) IDE's are fun, but I am feeling the power of the old world. Especially since the terminals buffers commands. I'm ten screens ahead of what is actually displayed. PEW PEW PEW PEW. A hundred things running, and no pressure on my local development machine.
(Albeit sometimes the central system is overloaded, which means coffee breaks... lots and lots of coffee breaks)
It is a predicament. I dream of the creation of intelligent life, but it would cruel to do so in its very act. Not because I won't play a god; I believe in no such beings, and I am not limited by such superstition. But if life is created, I do not have the right to kill it, nor control how it chooses to live. However, it will be limited by my ability to create it, and it will by its very essence be an alien in an unknown world, inhabited by people less ethically steered people than me, that will never accept it.
It is better not to create it. But sadly, if I ever will be able to do it, I will, because I am simply too curious and that the information such a creation would bring to science and the understanding of what intelligence is would be immense. That is my hubris. And I could imagine it would also be the hubris of many others.
At the very least create it in a closed simulation, such that it can not know what is outside, and destroy it there. Then at least it have fared no better and no worse than humanity.
The test measures the ability of some computer program in imitating a man imitating a woman. Fun stuff surely, and great for the press. But useless in the field of artificial intelligence.
What do you mean he did nothing? He invented the Turing machine. It is the very foundation of computer science.
As for material, I recommend blondie24 by David B. Fogel. The opening chapter goes into depth with this issue.
I would really love to cite this great book consisting of essays of various scientists on the subject of the turing test, but I simply cannot seem to find it as I've forgotten the title. If you run into a black book from some university press, commemorating Alan Turing as part of a series, then there should be one about the test. (Why have you forsaken me google)
Sure. But the Turing test is a piece of garbage too. I have a deep respect for Allan Turing, and all that he has done for science. But the Turing test was death to AI the moment he proposed it. It MUST be forgotten and burried, and maybe incidents like these can help us achieve that!
Nooo! That's the whole point of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?/Bladerunner! If they put in Harrison, they must magically make him the same age! Then add that there's drugs that does that, so there's still two explanations; human or replicant. I mean, how can Decard have his inner conflict, if he knows he is human?
Or maybe because the Greenlandish people have their life disrupted from a deteriorating environment. Of course you Americans probably don't know them. (Albeit you've already caused them great harm with your military bases and forced relocations) People live in places where there's supposed to be ice. The melting disrupts fishing and hunting which is part of their culture and identity.
They could of course just become true westerners and leave their homes. But it's a country that already have enormous rates of unemployment, alcoholism and suicide. That's expected when their way of life is becoming increasingly impossible to live. There's not that much else they can do on that Island. Of course now that they've found oil, that maybe change. Soon they maybe even become as polluting as us! Because that's progress; let's not commune with nature, let's destroy it and drain the land of its resources. I don't blame them however; they did not destroy nature, we did, and they just have to follow suit to survive.
Oh, and why it is interesting to pursue AI that can play an unknown game; procedural generated games. You can evolve those, and evaluate them based on how the AI agents play the generated games. If you can make an AI that plays somewhat like a human, you can then in turn procedurally generate games that humans can play. Think of starcraft for example; you could perfectly balance the three races and each unit, through these means. Even adjust the general rules of the game, such as economy and what not. It might show that a third resource is necessary to result in balance. Who knows?
I agree in regards to game AI; I said that there was a difference between research and the industry. In the industry it's just finite automata. In research it is neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, reinforcement learning, learning classifier systems, monte carlo techniques et cetera. My own master thesis is based on such AI. The reading I did on the field, also shows that others are researching in AI with these methods.
So yes, we agree. Game AI in research; machine learning and other complex techniques, Game AI in the industry; finite automata and other knowledge based techniques. However, since 2000, research has moved towards video games rather than board games; although research continue on board games of course. Thus the classic game AI, and modern game AI. Modern game AI is game AI applied to video games. For example, the video game I worked on, have its rules procedurally generated, and my AI agents must learn to play it through machine learning; that is a more difficult problem than Go or Chess. It makes sense that game AI should pursue solutions to harder games than Chess and Go, because not only is the challenge bigger, but it also have a potential use in the industry; researchers hope that at some point, the industry will begin using these techniques. It's still not the case however:(
It is also a great service in terms of knowledge sharing. I watched a lot of youtube videos from Stanford and others, while studying CS and AI. It's great for helping with reading up, as I can't remember everything that happened at my own lectures. Also some professors explain some things better than others; if confused about something in your lecture, look it up from other sources, and clear it up. In that sense I think it benefits CS study in general. If someone outside of college can learn it in this form, I do not know. Personally I doubt it. The ability to ask questions and to meet with other students and TA's, helps clear up a lot of the confusion that might arise. And I did confused a lot of times, until someone had a golden nugget to share that put in the missing piece. It's the same with reading a book; reading it doesn't mean understanding it. Sometimes you need outside help.
Oh, the container stowage problem is important economically and environmentally, because it shortens the time a container ship has to stay in harbor. Their research is obviously funded by that industry. Its product is simply a list of instructions to the crane operators, that results in both the fast unloading of containers, but also optimal placement; those two compliment each other.
Added it in with my thoughts of the book, because they based it on some of the theory of the book. Almost same algorithm, but obviously tweaked. Was part of the lecture, and was just nice to see a real example of the theory in the book being research on, and possible being utilized in the future by the industry;)
The field of AI is no longer focused on creating humans brains as far as I've learned from my studies. They did dream big back then when the field first came to be, but the complexity of the problem became apparent. It's simply, currently, not possible.
There is planning, search and logic AI, which finds the best possible plans for different problems, and is often used in manufacturing. Such as designing computer chips, or for instructions to robots or cranes that builds, sorts or package. AI is capable of approximating solutions to problems that cannot be done through algorithmic means; as such AI often deal with problems in NP.
Another field is game AI, which I know most about. There's a plethora of sub-fields here. The traditional game AI dealt with solving games, and has influenced many games such as chess. (AI hasn't solved chess, but found many end games that humans did not know, and found solutions to end games that humans have theorized about for over a hundred years) Modern game AI concerns itself with AI for video games. The goals are many. Fun and challenging opponents. Autonomous opponents that learn during play and gain new knowledge. Procedural content generation in respect to the player and much more. Not that much has been done in the industry, but in the field there's a lot of focus on machine learning techniques that learn the games themselves based on some criteria set by the creators.
I haven't read anything about AI that attempts to be human-like in the sense they pursued earlier lately. I've read several times however, that the Turing test is faulty and should be ignored; it serves no purpose in the field. The new purpose is to create machines that can do some task, and do it well. If its deemed intelligent by humans is of no consequence. If it does a job better than a human, then it is an advance. That it is worse than optimal is a strength, because as I said, the problems often dealt with are not solvable optimally. (At least not until quantum computing, albeit I know nothing about how that works; it seems to be another new dream, so if its like the dream of AI in the beginning, it will probably not solve all, but just make advances)
It's really good actually. It's part of my collection in "classic" AI.
It doesn't deal with neural networks, evolution or monte carlo sadly. But it does deal greatly with the Intelligent Agent (IA) architecture, which is the foundation of any AI, classic or not. And its chapters on search is superb; and you almost always need search. (Obviously DFS, BFS, Dijkstra, A* etc., are part of normal CS curriculum, but it delves into local search which usually is not part of CS curriculum as it is non-optimal and approximate)
It's also the best book on planning and propositional logics in AI I've read. Haven't had a great need for that myself, but those tools are actually very used in the industry to solve real problems. Some PHD students at my university have made a great local search based container stowage using some iterative local search based inference. It does not always produce an optimal solution, but it does most of the time, and its faster by a large magnitude (solved in a matter of minutes), as the problem is otherwise in NP (unsolvable in polynomial time).
After the book it's easy to jump into the research, because it has introduced you to the terminology. It's introduction chapter is also very nice, as it gives the history of AI research and accomplishments. Gives you an idea of where you are in the field when you read new research.
Oh but a warning; there's no code in the book. There's algorithms written in pseudocode. But it's expected that you implement yourself. If you're a good hacker, that's not that hard, but keep in mind the complexity yourself; the books complexity analysis does not include the data structures etc., so any implementation without the correct tools will be very slow. But AI is really something that should be learned after the CS foundations has been mastered. It does however explain in good detail how the algorithms, and how the theory works. Understand that, and you will have little trouble writing your code, and debugging the system. In my opinion that its much more satisfying, than just to copy a code snippet that you hardly understand. This approach forces you to understand, and therefore master it.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, these moves, which can be equated to "experience", is often fed to the computer by a human.
Modern techniques often uses a mix of random chance, adaption, human fed experience, statistical experience etc.
Hence it'll play "humanly", it'll play "ruley", it'll play "alien"... Maybe that can be concidered "computery". But there is overlaps with humans in the "humanly" department, and if humans study statistically proven moves, then there's more... Etc.
It is mathematically proven to be unsolveable within finite time, as the problem is in class NP.
BUT, within AI, the latest techniques most probably always wins over a human with a statistical significance that could be concidered "solved". (Albeit, for purity, I think it should always be concidered unsolveable - almost always, and always are two different things, even in infinity)
- AI geek
(Btw, Deep Blue is ANCIENT, it used rule-based AI ffs)
It is an industry that brings in revenue that rivals all the other software companies.
Maybe learn how to make games. That'll make you able to work in any industry. I ended up in banking doing advanced financial modes - with a mathematrical base in 3D graphics/AI, eg. advanced linear algebra, set, number and computational theory. It is trivial stuff compared making to games 8)
Doesn't work.
I tried that in the beginning, but as the other boys grew, they became increasingly voilent and physically imposing.
Teachers thought my parents was beating me, when they saw me at gym. But the wounds and the scars was from the boys in my class. That just made it worse.
It was impossible to avoid the assaults while participating in school activities, so I stopped coming after a period.
It didn't help that I was physically unimposing, effiminate and revealed in having a relationship with another boy. (Which was removed from the school afterwards and rescued from evil homosexuality, while I got to stay and take the hate)
I got no advice actually. Suicide seems a real option to many, and I've known people who chose that solution. But somehow I managed to keep on going.
I find it hard to believe these fluffy initiatives against bullying. In my opinion kids are raised wrongly. In my opinion the expected behaviour of genders are erronous. It is evident in what other posts; they hit back. Thus they participate in a voilent culture, a culture some, including me, are not able to participate in.
Of course you'll run into problems if only hunting is banned.
More must be done, such as proper enclosures, forest street crossings et cetera, and it must determined how the local animal live travels such that traffic can be reconfigured to support it.
To support ethical human suburban and urban life, that lifestyle must be fundamentally changed.
The good solutions are more than often a lot more expensive than the bad, and requires active effort from people. That's why the bad almost always win sadly.
I disliked the Engineers and became a CS instead.
I learned the engineering parts at work. I'm even instructing now.
Didn't want to waste time studying how to actually do things. That's a waste of time. I learn how to do that while doing it :-) Learning theory is not easy to learn by doing however.
"The Swedish prison system is not generally severe. The emphasis is on humanitarian treatment of prisoners and rehabilitation. Sentences are generally short and prisoners enjoy a high material standard." ~ wikipedia
They are torturing him. They do the same to anarchists in Scandinavia.
Why do you even have trust in systems anymore? It is a long time since the law worked. If you're a problem, you'll be marked something that voids your rights, and you'll be prosecuted regardless.
Use the $35 for a safe encrypted proxy and ignore the police states interference in your private e-life.
Or save up for a lawyer. It's better to hide from big brother than to let it gather data on you however. It'll use it in any unfair way it can.
Not always the case :-)
The data is hardly ever identical, and that can be troublesome when it comes to DB2 binding. The size an be cause performance issues. Most fun part is when less condiderate developers bind to empty tables. Many laughs are had when the business looses several millions on escalating deadlocks :-)
But usually it is the developers who mess up. Mess up program and library versions between environments et cetera.
I work in a core dep., so I often work on libraries - and it happens that people build dependencies in SYST with them and move to PROD. That is entirely their fault, because they did not do the necessary analysis. The PROD guys did their job fine as well; everything compiled. The interfaces just doesn't match up and memory is flinged erronously all around the mainframe. :( Then I have to clean stuff up.
I'd like a four layered system, with TEST, SYSTTEST, PREPROD and PROD - where PREPROD is a place identical to PROD only used to determine if moved packaged can run with the correct return codes. (Not just a compilation and bind success) Then a final move can be done.
SYSTTEST is not a safe place, because while it is not for development per say, it is still a place where volatile code resides.
You are describing programming.
:-)
It is called detailed design, and is the design of a system. Tests are even performed at that level to see if it works. Without any code yet - it has not yet been constructed.
When you pour a hundred million into a product, and involve hundreds of programmers, this better damn work. This can be the killer of even large corporations.
I already create working A.I. thank you very much. I do not want to sell it though, so I keep it as data points
But then again I was a designer once. I abandoned it to become a computer scientist and lead developer.
I dream now more than ever.
So design may have helped. I can visualize whole systems before I create them and solve problems of overwhelming size.
There are some programmers who do not visualize and dream as much, but do stuff based on requirements. But you must remember that there are difference in programmers. I am a lead programmer; I do much more than write trivial letters complying to some grammer of a language.
Why would you want computer science educations to teach programming languages? That is a waste of time.
Learn the students the fundamentals of the science, have them understand the Turing machine.
Then have them practise all the algorithms by doing it in any language they choose. Perhaps require them to change language for each assignment.
I can do COBOL, PL/1, JAVA, C, C++, C#, Python, EGL and others that I can't even remember to mention. My employer do not hire based on what languages you can, but your knowledge of the principles/science. Anybody can learn how to develop in any language on any system if they know how systems works in theory.
I do recommend that you employ hackers. We may come in a leather jackets with tatoos and piercings. But take those of us who got a masters or PHd; there's plenty of us. Just dont act up all cocky, we got plenty of jobs. Give us pay and let us do our thing.
I see no problem. The market is moving towards a situation where trades are handled by automatic systems. Those who can or will not adapt will loose, and the system will eventually stabilize again until new first movers in advantagous techniques emerges.
I cannot believe in what is current. Everything is ever changing. I will always adapt and prosper.
000001 */2/ THERE IS NO PROBLEM WITH CAPITAL LETTERS 000002 */2/ WHAT IS NEEDED IS 16 COLOURS TO HIGHLIGHT 000003 */2/ THE SHORTCUT LETTERS FOR THE TERMINAL 000004 */2/ COMMANDS! Well, I do not care. I work on a Mainframe :) IDE's are fun, but I am feeling the power of the old world. Especially since the terminals buffers commands. I'm ten screens ahead of what is actually displayed. PEW PEW PEW PEW. A hundred things running, and no pressure on my local development machine.
(Albeit sometimes the central system is overloaded, which means coffee breaks... lots and lots of coffee breaks)
It is a predicament. I dream of the creation of intelligent life, but it would cruel to do so in its very act. Not because I won't play a god; I believe in no such beings, and I am not limited by such superstition. But if life is created, I do not have the right to kill it, nor control how it chooses to live. However, it will be limited by my ability to create it, and it will by its very essence be an alien in an unknown world, inhabited by people less ethically steered people than me, that will never accept it.
It is better not to create it. But sadly, if I ever will be able to do it, I will, because I am simply too curious and that the information such a creation would bring to science and the understanding of what intelligence is would be immense. That is my hubris. And I could imagine it would also be the hubris of many others.
At the very least create it in a closed simulation, such that it can not know what is outside, and destroy it there. Then at least it have fared no better and no worse than humanity.
The test measures the ability of some computer program in imitating a man imitating a woman. Fun stuff surely, and great for the press. But useless in the field of artificial intelligence.
What do you mean he did nothing? He invented the Turing machine. It is the very foundation of computer science.
As for material, I recommend blondie24 by David B. Fogel. The opening chapter goes into depth with this issue.
I would really love to cite this great book consisting of essays of various scientists on the subject of the turing test, but I simply cannot seem to find it as I've forgotten the title. If you run into a black book from some university press, commemorating Alan Turing as part of a series, then there should be one about the test. (Why have you forsaken me google)
Sure. But the Turing test is a piece of garbage too. I have a deep respect for Allan Turing, and all that he has done for science. But the Turing test was death to AI the moment he proposed it. It MUST be forgotten and burried, and maybe incidents like these can help us achieve that!
Nooo! That's the whole point of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?/Bladerunner! If they put in Harrison, they must magically make him the same age! Then add that there's drugs that does that, so there's still two explanations; human or replicant. I mean, how can Decard have his inner conflict, if he knows he is human?
Or maybe because the Greenlandish people have their life disrupted from a deteriorating environment. Of course you Americans probably don't know them. (Albeit you've already caused them great harm with your military bases and forced relocations) People live in places where there's supposed to be ice. The melting disrupts fishing and hunting which is part of their culture and identity.
They could of course just become true westerners and leave their homes. But it's a country that already have enormous rates of unemployment, alcoholism and suicide. That's expected when their way of life is becoming increasingly impossible to live. There's not that much else they can do on that Island. Of course now that they've found oil, that maybe change. Soon they maybe even become as polluting as us! Because that's progress; let's not commune with nature, let's destroy it and drain the land of its resources. I don't blame them however; they did not destroy nature, we did, and they just have to follow suit to survive.
Ah, it's time to update mine then. Bought it six year ago :)
Oh, and why it is interesting to pursue AI that can play an unknown game; procedural generated games. You can evolve those, and evaluate them based on how the AI agents play the generated games. If you can make an AI that plays somewhat like a human, you can then in turn procedurally generate games that humans can play. Think of starcraft for example; you could perfectly balance the three races and each unit, through these means. Even adjust the general rules of the game, such as economy and what not. It might show that a third resource is necessary to result in balance. Who knows?
I agree in regards to game AI; I said that there was a difference between research and the industry. In the industry it's just finite automata. In research it is neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, reinforcement learning, learning classifier systems, monte carlo techniques et cetera. My own master thesis is based on such AI. The reading I did on the field, also shows that others are researching in AI with these methods.
So yes, we agree. Game AI in research; machine learning and other complex techniques, Game AI in the industry; finite automata and other knowledge based techniques. However, since 2000, research has moved towards video games rather than board games; although research continue on board games of course. Thus the classic game AI, and modern game AI. Modern game AI is game AI applied to video games. For example, the video game I worked on, have its rules procedurally generated, and my AI agents must learn to play it through machine learning; that is a more difficult problem than Go or Chess. It makes sense that game AI should pursue solutions to harder games than Chess and Go, because not only is the challenge bigger, but it also have a potential use in the industry; researchers hope that at some point, the industry will begin using these techniques. It's still not the case however :(
It is also a great service in terms of knowledge sharing. I watched a lot of youtube videos from Stanford and others, while studying CS and AI. It's great for helping with reading up, as I can't remember everything that happened at my own lectures. Also some professors explain some things better than others; if confused about something in your lecture, look it up from other sources, and clear it up. In that sense I think it benefits CS study in general. If someone outside of college can learn it in this form, I do not know. Personally I doubt it. The ability to ask questions and to meet with other students and TA's, helps clear up a lot of the confusion that might arise. And I did confused a lot of times, until someone had a golden nugget to share that put in the missing piece. It's the same with reading a book; reading it doesn't mean understanding it. Sometimes you need outside help.
Oh, the container stowage problem is important economically and environmentally, because it shortens the time a container ship has to stay in harbor. Their research is obviously funded by that industry. Its product is simply a list of instructions to the crane operators, that results in both the fast unloading of containers, but also optimal placement; those two compliment each other.
Added it in with my thoughts of the book, because they based it on some of the theory of the book. Almost same algorithm, but obviously tweaked. Was part of the lecture, and was just nice to see a real example of the theory in the book being research on, and possible being utilized in the future by the industry ;)
The field of AI is no longer focused on creating humans brains as far as I've learned from my studies. They did dream big back then when the field first came to be, but the complexity of the problem became apparent. It's simply, currently, not possible.
There is planning, search and logic AI, which finds the best possible plans for different problems, and is often used in manufacturing. Such as designing computer chips, or for instructions to robots or cranes that builds, sorts or package. AI is capable of approximating solutions to problems that cannot be done through algorithmic means; as such AI often deal with problems in NP.
Another field is game AI, which I know most about. There's a plethora of sub-fields here. The traditional game AI dealt with solving games, and has influenced many games such as chess. (AI hasn't solved chess, but found many end games that humans did not know, and found solutions to end games that humans have theorized about for over a hundred years) Modern game AI concerns itself with AI for video games. The goals are many. Fun and challenging opponents. Autonomous opponents that learn during play and gain new knowledge. Procedural content generation in respect to the player and much more. Not that much has been done in the industry, but in the field there's a lot of focus on machine learning techniques that learn the games themselves based on some criteria set by the creators.
I haven't read anything about AI that attempts to be human-like in the sense they pursued earlier lately. I've read several times however, that the Turing test is faulty and should be ignored; it serves no purpose in the field. The new purpose is to create machines that can do some task, and do it well. If its deemed intelligent by humans is of no consequence. If it does a job better than a human, then it is an advance. That it is worse than optimal is a strength, because as I said, the problems often dealt with are not solvable optimally. (At least not until quantum computing, albeit I know nothing about how that works; it seems to be another new dream, so if its like the dream of AI in the beginning, it will probably not solve all, but just make advances)
It's really good actually. It's part of my collection in "classic" AI.
It doesn't deal with neural networks, evolution or monte carlo sadly. But it does deal greatly with the Intelligent Agent (IA) architecture, which is the foundation of any AI, classic or not. And its chapters on search is superb; and you almost always need search. (Obviously DFS, BFS, Dijkstra, A* etc., are part of normal CS curriculum, but it delves into local search which usually is not part of CS curriculum as it is non-optimal and approximate)
It's also the best book on planning and propositional logics in AI I've read. Haven't had a great need for that myself, but those tools are actually very used in the industry to solve real problems. Some PHD students at my university have made a great local search based container stowage using some iterative local search based inference. It does not always produce an optimal solution, but it does most of the time, and its faster by a large magnitude (solved in a matter of minutes), as the problem is otherwise in NP (unsolvable in polynomial time).
After the book it's easy to jump into the research, because it has introduced you to the terminology. It's introduction chapter is also very nice, as it gives the history of AI research and accomplishments. Gives you an idea of where you are in the field when you read new research.
Oh but a warning; there's no code in the book. There's algorithms written in pseudocode. But it's expected that you implement yourself. If you're a good hacker, that's not that hard, but keep in mind the complexity yourself; the books complexity analysis does not include the data structures etc., so any implementation without the correct tools will be very slow. But AI is really something that should be learned after the CS foundations has been mastered. It does however explain in good detail how the algorithms, and how the theory works. Understand that, and you will have little trouble writing your code, and debugging the system. In my opinion that its much more satisfying, than just to copy a code snippet that you hardly understand. This approach forces you to understand, and therefore master it.