that bittorrent can be used for legit purposes. Hopefully as a side benifit, this will make it harder for the MPAA crowd to villify these types of file sharing networks.
Thanks for the clarification. It truly was just a question as I don't know anything about the politcal landscape in Egypt at all.
However, from the reports I've been reading, it doesn't appear that the protesters are satisfied with the military control and are demanding democracy, though I don't see how they can expect that to happen instantaniously. Surely someone must be in charge during the interim.
The only question is, "Is there really any difference between Mubarak being in control and the military being in control?". Doesn't the military leadership consist of people put there by Mubarak?
I did not realize buffer overflows were a problem for apps written in Java.
In general, they're not. However, there have been a few bugs in the JRE found over the years that resulted in stack buffer overflows which could have led to an exploit. AFAIK, all of these know bugs have long been fixed. However, there is always the potential that a new bug could be found.
DBC is not about managing memory for Java, it's simply a tool (using annotations) to allow validation (think ASSERTs) of arguments to methods and the values the methods return.
it's not the best langage on any scale. Not the simplest, not the fastest either to write or execute...
Exactly the point. Java tends to be the best mix of simplicity and speed.
The simplest would probably be something like LOGO. Care to write a really complex application in it?
C (or Fortran) would probably qualify as the fastest (execution), as long as you have plenty of time to test and profile to ensure you've caught all the memory leaks and broken pointers.
Fastest to write? I dunno. It all depends on the app you're writing, the IDE your using, etc. Personally I find I can code in Java faster than in other languages (except maybe Perl for some applications), but YMMV. This is a very individual thing.
The real reason Java is so popular is that it's really really hard not to learn Java at some point in your programmer life. Hell, it replaced C++ as the default learning language in my school. I think I had lecture of Java in 90% of the possible platforms.
I think you have it backwards. The reason you got so much exposure to it in school is because it is far and away the most popular language out there with only C anywhere close to it.
Java's problem is that the language and the libraries are full of badly designed, ill-conceived, overly complex features
Bullshit. That may be your opinion, but I've always found the libraries very well designed. Just about every time I've ever ventured into using parts of the API that I hadn't used before, it's been just the way I had intuited it would be and I rarely needed to resort to javadocs to understand the structure. Of all the API's I've used over the years (which covers just about every major platform out there including OSX's API,.Net (which should have been better given they had a reference implementation to copy from), MFC, etc), I find it the most consistent and well organized by a long shot. Is it perfect? No, but neither are any alternative platforms.
There are valid criticisms of the Java platform, but I've never once heard the "badly designed" criticism leveled against it's APIs except by those who don't know what they are doing. There is valid criticism of some of the frameworks for Java EE, but that is a framework issue, not a language issue (i.e. not part of J2SE). If you don't like the Java EE stuff, there are plenty of other frameworks to choose from, but the truth is, once you understand EJBs and the whole ecosystem it make perfectly good sense and is actually quite valuable when constructing extremely complex and large enterprise applications. So, the answer to your question is that Oracle will probably do just as Sun did before them and deprecate features that are considered obsolete (leaving them in for legacy support) and move on. The entire J2SE JDK platform is less than 100MB (JRE is only 14MB), about half the size of the.Net platform so I don't really see this as a problem. Additionally, JDK7 will be adding modularization which will dramatically improve this issue as well.
You can't undo a decade of inept academic language tinkering by adding more stuff.
WTF? Academic tinkering? Name me one language that has grown up more "in the field" than Java (at least one that has not become a complete "hack" - yea Perl people, I'm looking at you - I love Perl, but wow, it's like it was intentionally designed to weed out the non-geek types). The changes that have been made to Java over the years have been driven by those using it for real-world work, not by academic institutions, which is can hardly been said of many of the other language choices out there.
Just so we're clear. I think Java is a great language and platform, I think it's the right tool for many things, but I'm not religious about it. When I'm writing on OSX, I use Obj-C (when in Rome...). Obj-C definitely has it's warts, but the OSX ecosystem has evolved around it so it's the best tool for development on that platform if that is the targeted platform. If I'm writing windows desktop apps, I use VS/C# (sometimes Powerbuilder) because that's the best tool for writing that type of application. C# is a very nice language and the.Net APIs are very usable as well. If I'm writing batch (command line) apps for Unix/Linux I use a combination of Perl, shell scripts and C or C++ (sometimes Java) to get the job done because that's what works best in that environment. However, when I'm writing back-end systems I tend to use Java because it offers the best solution to some really complex problems.
I wasn't referring to in-house apps. I was referring to vendor supplied enterprise apps (infrastructure tools like ESB, BPM, EAI, etc). All sorts of intranet "head end" apps, departmental apps, vertical systems, etc. They all use java. Since these are backend systems for the most part, they have the advantage of being able to run the same binaries on Unix, Linux, Windows, OSX (rarely) or even on the mainframes.
Consumer apps tend to be desktop apps and as has been noted repeatedly, client-side java has never taken hold, so this is no real surprise.
Java FX 2.0 may help the desktop situation, but my guess is it's too little too late. The world is moving on and my feeling is the future of the consumer market is in iOS and Android. With the phone and tablet markets ruled by these platforms, I see nothing to prevent them from ruling the desktop GUI space as well. It's more a matter of "when" rather than "if".
I get where you are coming from and Oracle has definitely hurt some feelings in the FOSS community.
However, I don't share your vision of Java's future. I think Oracle will kick Java into high-gear again (it was stagnating under the slow pace of the JCP). Regardless of what you or I think of Larry Ellison personally, the guy does seem to kick ass with everybody that's ever tangled with him. If I'm reading the tea-leaves correctly, this might just push Java to the next level, sending all the java haters scrambling for new reasons to hate it.
Can you name one large corporation that doesn't have Java just about everywhere? If it's not the primary development language, it's certain ONE of the top (and by "large corporation" I'm talking F1000, not your parent's garage). I've working in many large enterprise development shops over the years and I haven't found a single one.
Even if they don't do their own development using Java, their infrastructure (ESBs, BPMs, SOAs, etc) is wall to wall java code. Why? Sorry to piss off the java-haters here in/., but it's that way because it just works that damn well. End of story.
Wow, do you live in fantasy land. You are now officially the village idiot. Join your brothers who've been declaring java dead for years while it continues to soar in popularity, completely out of the reach of EVERY other language except for "C".
I'm not real happy with the way Oracle has treated the FOSS community or with how it's dealing with Google on the Java/Android issue.
However, Oracle does have a track record of kicking ass and taking names and they do appear to want to push Java to the next level quickly rather than wait around for the JCP and all their committees to make up their minds on the direction the language should take. Stagnation has been a big problem for Java over the last couple of years, but I get the sense that the words "stagnation" and "java" won't been used together as much under Oracle's reign.
Just about every vendor's enterprise desktop applications I've seen over the last 5 years or so. Of course, I realize that enterprise applications are not cool on/. so I can see how this goes unnoticed.
Java on the desktop has NEVER been there, but Java on the server is seeing more usage than ever (up over 1% since 2010), far more than any other language by a considerable distance. Only "C" is even close (not C++ or Obj-C)
If you buy an electronic device today and expect to get all the new features of any new OS version that may come out for x number of years you're living in fantasy land. If you are smart, you purchase the device with the features it comes shipped with and the most you can reasonable expect is to "maybe" get bug fixes for a while.
Apple is no exception to this either. Sure, I can run iOS 4.2 on my iPhone 3G, and what does it get me? App folders, consolidated emails and much crappier performance (camera is practically useless because it's so slow to snap pics). Whoopty shit, I'm so impressed.
What about multitasking, iPhone locator service (without an extra $99/yr), homescreen wallpaper, etc?
The "planned obsolescence" you point out is a problem with the handset manufacturers, not with Android. Some manufacturers are better than others, so just do some homework before you purchase, or skip the homework and just buy into the Apple RDF and tell yourself your iPhone will get upgrades forever.
Honeycomb will address this issue with a full data encryption option. While this will only be available on tablets initially, it will also make it into Ice Cream (2.4) for phones as well.
Sure, there is technology to lift a fingerprint, reverse the image and create a mold and use it to fool the scanner, but let's be real. How many average hackers are going to go through this much trouble to hack into someone's phone. If you are a CIA operative maybe this doesn't ensure your protection, but for the average Joe, it's more than adequate.
Right. Gripe about Obama wanting to spend $53B over 6 years on a program that will improve our shitty infrastructure and create jobs in the process, but praise the Repubs for spending $700B on saving the tax cut for the top 2% which creates nothing except more wealth for the top 2%. Oh, and before you say it, not collecting $700B in taxes is EXACTLY the same as spending it no matter how Fox news wants to frame it.
This discussion has gone on far longer than it should have, but I just have one more comment.
I can agree to using this definition with the caveat that making a decision and reasoning both require freedom of action. A thermostat does not have freedom of action.
What does freedom of action mean? Unless you ascribe to some spiritual intervention, every decision you make is the result of physical processes occurring within your brain. You can't escape this fact. No matter how you might wish it otherwise, every thought you have is the product of basic electrochemical processes so what you think of as "freedom of choice" is really an illusion. Excluding the effects of quantum mechanics (which have minimal impact at the molecular level anyway), these processes are deterministic. Given enough information about the stucture of your brain (the neurons, synaptic connections, chemical makeup, etc) at any moment in time, your next thought is completely predictable. A thermostat has only a couple of factors that influence when it will cut on or off the furnace (i.e. temperature, setting of the dial) so it's "decisions" are limited to these states. The human brain has millions of neurons and many billions of connections. Add to this the fact that it is an analog system and the complexity becomes mind boggling. Still, the system does exist in the physical and is subject to the same laws of physics as the thermostat.
Statements like this is why it is hard to take AI fanatics seriously.
I doubt many of us that have actually worked in the field of AI really care whether you take it seriously or not. The point about intelligence that, try as I might, I can't seem to get across here is that intelligence is the measurement of the amount of reasoning or decision making capability an entity has. There is no concept of "this is intelligent while this is not" but rather the concept is "this is more intelligent than that". If an entity has the ability to receive input and based on that input make a decision, it is exhibiting intelligent behavior. Is it exhibiting "human level" intelligence? Of course not. Humans possess the most advanced level of intelligence that we are aware of, but that intelligence is the result of millions of neurons with billions of interconnections, each with their own ability to receive stimulus and produce behavior. It is the aggregate effect of these smaller units of intelligent behaviors that constitute what we think of as human level intelligence.
However, the thermostat is not deciding(1) to change the temperature. It is opening or closing a switch based on a logic table or algorithm.
Oh, and I suppose the network of neurons in your brain works on magic. There is no logic or algorithm implemented organically within the cell structures and connections. When you make a decision do you not think there is some underlying set of chemical and electrical processes that occur that generate that decision?
None of these really exemplify AI.
We'll just have to disagree here. You may not want to call a chess program an example of AI, but I'm sorry, it most definitely is. You misunderstand what Deep Blue and it's team of programmers were doing. Obviously if there were just programmers in the back room making all the decisions that wouldn't have needed a multi-million dollar computer. While I agree that having the programmers involved during the games taints the results, the programmers were merely tweaking the algorithms as they encountered new situations their algorithms had not taken into account. The choice of moves was done using AI logic.
It's obvious you haven't thought though either the parallel parking or the cross country driving examples. Parallel parking is a lot harder than you imagine, having to process visual input, make judgments as to how much to turn the wheels, how much to back up or go forward, judging the distance to the curb and the cars in front and back. If if were that easy it would have been made available years ago.
The cross country driving I'm referring to is what MIT, Carnegie Mellon and others have been working on. The goal is a completely automated vehicle capable of navigating through traffic and driving from one end of the country to the other without any human intervention. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071105230951.htm
Also, the ability to learn is not a prerequisite to intelligence. It's definitely a "nice to have" feature so that the existing intelligence can be enhanced but it's not a requirement. Even an amoeba has a certain amount of intelligence imparted to it through genetics. It has the ability to sense where more nutrition is in it's environment and then use it rudimentary locomotion to move to the area of higher nutritional concentration. It has no ability to learn, but it does exhibit this very basic intelligent behavior.
You are cheating by redefining "intelligence". In fact, no normal person would call an amoeba intelligent, and there would be widespread resistance to calling anything other than human beings intelligent. Chimps, dogs and dolphins have been described as intelligent, but even this is by no means universally accepted.
I'm not redefining intelligence. My point was that intelligence is a relative term. Compared to a rock, yes an amoeba has intelligence. I don't think there is really any debate (at least in the scientific world) over whether chimps, dogs or dolphins have intelligence. Any animal that has a cerebral cortex (which includes all mammals) has intelligence by even the most strict (scientific) definition. That is not to say that they are all equally intelligent, which was the point I was originally trying to make but apparently was lost. There is no "universally" accepted definition. In the same way that evolution is not universally accepted, that doesn't make it any less factual.
We will have true Artificial Intelligence when machines can do things that human beings do, not single cell organisms.
Such as? How about Chess, parallel parking, cross country driving? All things humans can do, now being done using AI.
Or do you mean by your definition it must be able to do ALL the things a human being can do? Both humans and AI can do advanced calculus, but about 95% of humans would disqualify as intelligent by that standard.
Can you memorize a corpus of millions of interrelated related facts and be able to recall the relationship between any of these within milliseconds? AI can but humans can't. Does that make machines more intelligent than humans? No it doesn't. You're definition of AI is no definition at all because you can't even define "things that human beings do".
Doesn't this (including the unquoted remainder of the paragraph and the paragraph that follows) broaden the definition of AI to include nearly all information processing?
No, it doesn't, although there is not universal definition of what AI is, so it tends to be whatever the speaker says it is. AI is really a field of computer science, but it receives as input, the disciplines of psychology, cognitive science, neurophysiology, mathematics and many more.
AI is not an particular technique or algorithm. The only true test of whether something is intelligent is through it's behavior. It really goes back to the Turing test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test). If the appears to the user to exhibit intelligence, it is in fact intelligence. It doesn't matter what programming techniques were employed to produce the result.
This is a philosophical statement to which I'm not certain I can agree without a better definition of intelligent behavior. If the behavior of the amoeba in your previous example qualifies I can't agree as it makes the definition of what can be considered intelligent virtually meaningless. (If sensing and responding to an environment qualifies, then my thermostat must be considered intelligent.)
I won't ask you to define intelligence -- it's a very slippery word -- just what qualifies, in your opinion, as intelligent behavior.
That is my whole point. How long is a string?
In the case of you thermostat, yes, I would consider it to have a certain level of intelligence. A thermostat that can, in addition to sensing the temperature and controlling the furnace, knows about the current utility rates at the particular time of day and adjusts the temperature downward so you can achieve lower power bills would be more intelligent than than the previous one. Intelligence is a continuum, and can range from something as simple as an amoeba to a swarm of bees to a two year old child and up through the greatest geniuses of all time. Every time we add a new feature to a device it increases it's intelligence and this has been going on for quite some time. AI has been essentially sneaking in through the back door and nobody seems to notice (at least not on/.). The story is different if you peruse any of the many AI or cognitive research outlets on the web (journals, universities or AI specific websites).
That wasn't your original claim. The claim was that AI was advancing at an accelerated pace. (I don't know how you'd measure the rate) I don't disagree that what is now being termed AI is in use in many places.
AI, like hardware and software development, observes Moore's law. Each technology (such as speech recognition, visual recognition, etc) that is sufficiently advanced is layered on top of the advances from other areas, resulting in exponential rather than linear advancement.
Take the classic "conversational" AI (like Watson, Eliza, etc) for example. Most of the problems in actual speech recognition have been resolved. Further advances will come from systems that are capable to some degree of "understanding" what is being spoken (semantic analysis) and use this "thought" as input to an inference engine to perform the analyis and generate a response. The response can be fed through a grammar engine and finally to a speech generator which would respond back to the user. Each of these components exist today at various levels of sophistication and are the subjects of much research. As each advances and is paired back with the others, the entire system shows rapid improvement in terms of it's perceived intelligence.
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that bittorrent can be used for legit purposes. Hopefully as a side benifit, this will make it harder for the MPAA crowd to villify these types of file sharing networks.
Thanks for the clarification. It truly was just a question as I don't know anything about the politcal landscape in Egypt at all.
However, from the reports I've been reading, it doesn't appear that the protesters are satisfied with the military control and are demanding democracy, though I don't see how they can expect that to happen instantaniously. Surely someone must be in charge during the interim.
The only question is, "Is there really any difference between Mubarak being in control and the military being in control?". Doesn't the military leadership consist of people put there by Mubarak?
I did not realize buffer overflows were a problem for apps written in Java.
In general, they're not. However, there have been a few bugs in the JRE found over the years that resulted in stack buffer overflows which could have led to an exploit . AFAIK, all of these know bugs have long been fixed. However, there is always the potential that a new bug could be found.
DBC is not about managing memory for Java, it's simply a tool (using annotations) to allow validation (think ASSERTs) of arguments to methods and the values the methods return.
This is not an OS issue. Nokia could've locked down MeeGo at any time just as well.
it's not the best langage on any scale. Not the simplest, not the fastest either to write or execute...
Exactly the point. Java tends to be the best mix of simplicity and speed.
The simplest would probably be something like LOGO. Care to write a really complex application in it?
C (or Fortran) would probably qualify as the fastest (execution), as long as you have plenty of time to test and profile to ensure you've caught all the memory leaks and broken pointers.
Fastest to write? I dunno. It all depends on the app you're writing, the IDE your using, etc. Personally I find I can code in Java faster than in other languages (except maybe Perl for some applications), but YMMV. This is a very individual thing.
The real reason Java is so popular is that it's really really hard not to learn Java at some point in your programmer life. Hell, it replaced C++ as the default learning language in my school. I think I had lecture of Java in 90% of the possible platforms.
I think you have it backwards. The reason you got so much exposure to it in school is because it is far and away the most popular language out there with only C anywhere close to it.
Java's problem is that the language and the libraries are full of badly designed, ill-conceived, overly complex features
Bullshit. That may be your opinion, but I've always found the libraries very well designed. Just about every time I've ever ventured into using parts of the API that I hadn't used before, it's been just the way I had intuited it would be and I rarely needed to resort to javadocs to understand the structure. Of all the API's I've used over the years (which covers just about every major platform out there including OSX's API, .Net (which should have been better given they had a reference implementation to copy from), MFC, etc), I find it the most consistent and well organized by a long shot. Is it perfect? No, but neither are any alternative platforms.
There are valid criticisms of the Java platform, but I've never once heard the "badly designed" criticism leveled against it's APIs except by those who don't know what they are doing. There is valid criticism of some of the frameworks for Java EE, but that is a framework issue, not a language issue (i.e. not part of J2SE). If you don't like the Java EE stuff, there are plenty of other frameworks to choose from, but the truth is, once you understand EJBs and the whole ecosystem it make perfectly good sense and is actually quite valuable when constructing extremely complex and large enterprise applications. So, the answer to your question is that Oracle will probably do just as Sun did before them and deprecate features that are considered obsolete (leaving them in for legacy support) and move on. The entire J2SE JDK platform is less than 100MB (JRE is only 14MB), about half the size of the .Net platform so I don't really see this as a problem. Additionally, JDK7 will be adding modularization which will dramatically improve this issue as well.
You can't undo a decade of inept academic language tinkering by adding more stuff.
WTF? Academic tinkering? Name me one language that has grown up more "in the field" than Java (at least one that has not become a complete "hack" - yea Perl people, I'm looking at you - I love Perl, but wow, it's like it was intentionally designed to weed out the non-geek types). The changes that have been made to Java over the years have been driven by those using it for real-world work, not by academic institutions, which is can hardly been said of many of the other language choices out there.
Just so we're clear. I think Java is a great language and platform, I think it's the right tool for many things, but I'm not religious about it. When I'm writing on OSX, I use Obj-C (when in Rome...). Obj-C definitely has it's warts, but the OSX ecosystem has evolved around it so it's the best tool for development on that platform if that is the targeted platform. If I'm writing windows desktop apps, I use VS/C# (sometimes Powerbuilder) because that's the best tool for writing that type of application. C# is a very nice language and the .Net APIs are very usable as well. If I'm writing batch (command line) apps for Unix/Linux I use a combination of Perl, shell scripts and C or C++ (sometimes Java) to get the job done because that's what works best in that environment. However, when I'm writing back-end systems I tend to use Java because it offers the best solution to some really complex problems.
Consumer apps tend to be desktop apps and as has been noted repeatedly, client-side java has never taken hold, so this is no real surprise.
Java FX 2.0 may help the desktop situation, but my guess is it's too little too late. The world is moving on and my feeling is the future of the consumer market is in iOS and Android. With the phone and tablet markets ruled by these platforms, I see nothing to prevent them from ruling the desktop GUI space as well. It's more a matter of "when" rather than "if".
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this could be "Google's revenge". Return any searches for Sun or Oracle with broken links.
However, I don't share your vision of Java's future. I think Oracle will kick Java into high-gear again (it was stagnating under the slow pace of the JCP). Regardless of what you or I think of Larry Ellison personally, the guy does seem to kick ass with everybody that's ever tangled with him. If I'm reading the tea-leaves correctly, this might just push Java to the next level, sending all the java haters scrambling for new reasons to hate it.
Even if they don't do their own development using Java, their infrastructure (ESBs, BPMs, SOAs, etc) is wall to wall java code. Why? Sorry to piss off the java-haters here in /., but it's that way because it just works that damn well. End of story.
Wow, do you live in fantasy land. You are now officially the village idiot. Join your brothers who've been declaring java dead for years while it continues to soar in popularity, completely out of the reach of EVERY other language except for "C".
I'm not real happy with the way Oracle has treated the FOSS community or with how it's dealing with Google on the Java/Android issue.
However, Oracle does have a track record of kicking ass and taking names and they do appear to want to push Java to the next level quickly rather than wait around for the JCP and all their committees to make up their minds on the direction the language should take. Stagnation has been a big problem for Java over the last couple of years, but I get the sense that the words "stagnation" and "java" won't been used together as much under Oracle's reign.
Just about every vendor's enterprise desktop applications I've seen over the last 5 years or so. Of course, I realize that enterprise applications are not cool on /. so I can see how this goes unnoticed.
Client side Java seems to be doomed
No, it's just called Android now.
Java on the desktop has NEVER been there, but Java on the server is seeing more usage than ever (up over 1% since 2010), far more than any other language by a considerable distance. Only "C" is even close (not C++ or Obj-C)
Sorry to spoil the "bash Java" party.
Apple is no exception to this either. Sure, I can run iOS 4.2 on my iPhone 3G, and what does it get me? App folders, consolidated emails and much crappier performance (camera is practically useless because it's so slow to snap pics). Whoopty shit, I'm so impressed.
What about multitasking, iPhone locator service (without an extra $99/yr), homescreen wallpaper, etc?
The "planned obsolescence" you point out is a problem with the handset manufacturers, not with Android. Some manufacturers are better than others, so just do some homework before you purchase, or skip the homework and just buy into the Apple RDF and tell yourself your iPhone will get upgrades forever.
Honeycomb and Ice Cream will offer full data encryption options.
Honeycomb will address this issue with a full data encryption option. While this will only be available on tablets initially, it will also make it into Ice Cream (2.4) for phones as well.
Sure, there is technology to lift a fingerprint, reverse the image and create a mold and use it to fool the scanner, but let's be real. How many average hackers are going to go through this much trouble to hack into someone's phone. If you are a CIA operative maybe this doesn't ensure your protection, but for the average Joe, it's more than adequate.
http://www.ur-news.com/review-att-motorola-atrix-4g.html
Right. Gripe about Obama wanting to spend $53B over 6 years on a program that will improve our shitty infrastructure and create jobs in the process, but praise the Repubs for spending $700B on saving the tax cut for the top 2% which creates nothing except more wealth for the top 2%. Oh, and before you say it, not collecting $700B in taxes is EXACTLY the same as spending it no matter how Fox news wants to frame it.
This discussion has gone on far longer than it should have, but I just have one more comment.
I can agree to using this definition with the caveat that making a decision and reasoning both require freedom of action. A thermostat does not have freedom of action.
What does freedom of action mean? Unless you ascribe to some spiritual intervention, every decision you make is the result of physical processes occurring within your brain. You can't escape this fact. No matter how you might wish it otherwise, every thought you have is the product of basic electrochemical processes so what you think of as "freedom of choice" is really an illusion. Excluding the effects of quantum mechanics (which have minimal impact at the molecular level anyway), these processes are deterministic. Given enough information about the stucture of your brain (the neurons, synaptic connections, chemical makeup, etc) at any moment in time, your next thought is completely predictable. A thermostat has only a couple of factors that influence when it will cut on or off the furnace (i.e. temperature, setting of the dial) so it's "decisions" are limited to these states. The human brain has millions of neurons and many billions of connections. Add to this the fact that it is an analog system and the complexity becomes mind boggling. Still, the system does exist in the physical and is subject to the same laws of physics as the thermostat.
Statements like this is why it is hard to take AI fanatics seriously.
I doubt many of us that have actually worked in the field of AI really care whether you take it seriously or not. The point about intelligence that, try as I might, I can't seem to get across here is that intelligence is the measurement of the amount of reasoning or decision making capability an entity has. There is no concept of "this is intelligent while this is not" but rather the concept is "this is more intelligent than that". If an entity has the ability to receive input and based on that input make a decision, it is exhibiting intelligent behavior. Is it exhibiting "human level" intelligence? Of course not. Humans possess the most advanced level of intelligence that we are aware of, but that intelligence is the result of millions of neurons with billions of interconnections, each with their own ability to receive stimulus and produce behavior. It is the aggregate effect of these smaller units of intelligent behaviors that constitute what we think of as human level intelligence.
However, the thermostat is not deciding(1) to change the temperature. It is opening or closing a switch based on a logic table or algorithm.
Oh, and I suppose the network of neurons in your brain works on magic. There is no logic or algorithm implemented organically within the cell structures and connections. When you make a decision do you not think there is some underlying set of chemical and electrical processes that occur that generate that decision?
None of these really exemplify AI.
We'll just have to disagree here. You may not want to call a chess program an example of AI, but I'm sorry, it most definitely is. You misunderstand what Deep Blue and it's team of programmers were doing. Obviously if there were just programmers in the back room making all the decisions that wouldn't have needed a multi-million dollar computer. While I agree that having the programmers involved during the games taints the results, the programmers were merely tweaking the algorithms as they encountered new situations their algorithms had not taken into account. The choice of moves was done using AI logic.
It's obvious you haven't thought though either the parallel parking or the cross country driving examples. Parallel parking is a lot harder than you imagine, having to process visual input, make judgments as to how much to turn the wheels, how much to back up or go forward, judging the distance to the curb and the cars in front and back. If if were that easy it would have been made available years ago.
The cross country driving I'm referring to is what MIT, Carnegie Mellon and others have been working on. The goal is a completely automated vehicle capable of navigating through traffic and driving from one end of the country to the other without any human intervention. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071105230951.htm
Also, the ability to learn is not a prerequisite to intelligence. It's definitely a "nice to have" feature so that the existing intelligence can be enhanced but it's not a requirement. Even an amoeba has a certain amount of intelligence imparted to it through genetics. It has the ability to sense where more nutrition is in it's environment and then use it rudimentary locomotion to move to the area of higher nutritional concentration. It has no ability to learn, but it does exhibit this very basic intelligent behavior.
You are cheating by redefining "intelligence". In fact, no normal person would call an amoeba intelligent, and there would be widespread resistance to calling anything other than human beings intelligent. Chimps, dogs and dolphins have been described as intelligent, but even this is by no means universally accepted.
I'm not redefining intelligence. My point was that intelligence is a relative term. Compared to a rock, yes an amoeba has intelligence. I don't think there is really any debate (at least in the scientific world) over whether chimps, dogs or dolphins have intelligence. Any animal that has a cerebral cortex (which includes all mammals) has intelligence by even the most strict (scientific) definition. That is not to say that they are all equally intelligent, which was the point I was originally trying to make but apparently was lost. There is no "universally" accepted definition. In the same way that evolution is not universally accepted, that doesn't make it any less factual.
We will have true Artificial Intelligence when machines can do things that human beings do, not single cell organisms.
Such as? How about Chess, parallel parking, cross country driving? All things humans can do, now being done using AI.
Or do you mean by your definition it must be able to do ALL the things a human being can do? Both humans and AI can do advanced calculus, but about 95% of humans would disqualify as intelligent by that standard.
Can you memorize a corpus of millions of interrelated related facts and be able to recall the relationship between any of these within milliseconds? AI can but humans can't. Does that make machines more intelligent than humans? No it doesn't. You're definition of AI is no definition at all because you can't even define "things that human beings do".
Doesn't this (including the unquoted remainder of the paragraph and the paragraph that follows) broaden the definition of AI to include nearly all information processing?
No, it doesn't, although there is not universal definition of what AI is, so it tends to be whatever the speaker says it is. AI is really a field of computer science, but it receives as input, the disciplines of psychology, cognitive science, neurophysiology, mathematics and many more. AI is not an particular technique or algorithm. The only true test of whether something is intelligent is through it's behavior. It really goes back to the Turing test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test). If the appears to the user to exhibit intelligence, it is in fact intelligence. It doesn't matter what programming techniques were employed to produce the result.
This is a philosophical statement to which I'm not certain I can agree without a better definition of intelligent behavior. If the behavior of the amoeba in your previous example qualifies I can't agree as it makes the definition of what can be considered intelligent virtually meaningless. (If sensing and responding to an environment qualifies, then my thermostat must be considered intelligent.)
I won't ask you to define intelligence -- it's a very slippery word -- just what qualifies, in your opinion, as intelligent behavior.
That is my whole point. How long is a string?
In the case of you thermostat, yes, I would consider it to have a certain level of intelligence. A thermostat that can, in addition to sensing the temperature and controlling the furnace, knows about the current utility rates at the particular time of day and adjusts the temperature downward so you can achieve lower power bills would be more intelligent than than the previous one. Intelligence is a continuum, and can range from something as simple as an amoeba to a swarm of bees to a two year old child and up through the greatest geniuses of all time. Every time we add a new feature to a device it increases it's intelligence and this has been going on for quite some time. AI has been essentially sneaking in through the back door and nobody seems to notice (at least not on /.). The story is different if you peruse any of the many AI or cognitive research outlets on the web (journals, universities or AI specific websites).
That wasn't your original claim. The claim was that AI was advancing at an accelerated pace. (I don't know how you'd measure the rate) I don't disagree that what is now being termed AI is in use in many places.
AI, like hardware and software development, observes Moore's law. Each technology (such as speech recognition, visual recognition, etc) that is sufficiently advanced is layered on top of the advances from other areas, resulting in exponential rather than linear advancement.
Take the classic "conversational" AI (like Watson, Eliza, etc) for example. Most of the problems in actual speech recognition have been resolved. Further advances will come from systems that are capable to some degree of "understanding" what is being spoken (semantic analysis) and use this "thought" as input to an inference engine to perform the analyis and generate a response. The response can be fed through a grammar engine and finally to a speech generator which would respond back to the user. Each of these components exist today at various levels of sophistication and are the subjects of much research. As each advances and is paired back with the others, the entire system shows rapid improvement in terms of it's perceived intelligence.