Explaining Artificial Intelligence to Everyone
April 18, 2010
Science Daily ran a story on April 1, 2010. I was not sure if this story was a joke or whether it was serious. I will let you decide. The title was “Grand Unified Theory of AI: New Approach Unites Two Prevailing but Often Opposed Strains in Artificial-Intelligence Research.” The write up explains the Math Club approach; that is, the use of numerical methods, which are now popular. The article describes the rules based approach, which requires a human to write the rules. The core of the story is a pitch for the “Church system”. Science Daily explains:
“With probabilistic reasoning, you get all that structure for free,” Goodman says. A Church program that has never encountered a flightless bird might, initially, set the probability that any bird can fly at 99.99 percent. But as it learns more about cassowaries — and penguins, and caged and broken-winged robins — it revises its probabilities accordingly. Ultimately, the probabilities represent all the conceptual distinctions that early AI researchers would have had to code by hand. But the system learns those distinctions itself, over time — much the way humans learn new concepts and revise old ones. “What’s brilliant about this is that it allows you to build a cognitive model in a fantastically much more straightforward and transparent way than you could do before,” says Nick Chater, a professor of cognitive and decision sciences at University College London. “You can imagine all the things that a human knows, and trying to list those would just be an endless task, and it might even be an infinite task. But the magic trick is saying, ‘No, no, just tell me a few things,’ and then the brain — or in this case the Church system, hopefully somewhat analogous to the way the mind does it — can churn out, using its probabilistic calculation, all the consequences and inferences. And also, when you give the system new information, it can figure out the consequences of that.”
We talked about this write up at lunch and decided that we would invite readers to read the article and draw a conclusion about a “unified theory of artificial intelligence.”
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2010
A freebie.
Comments
One Response to “Explaining Artificial Intelligence to Everyone”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
[…] Explaining Artificial Intelligence to Everyone (arnoldit.com) […]