Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 17:39:27 01/25/98
Go up one level in this thread
On January 25, 1998 at 19:23:18, Amir Ban wrote: >On January 25, 1998 at 15:07:25, Komputer Korner wrote: > >[entire post snipped] > >Come on, Komputer. At least be annoyed for the right reasons. ICCAJ >decided to bore us to death, and Mr. Korf seems to be the only person >around who doesn't realize that any IBM statement on this is done for >reasons of PR. > >I don't think any of your arguments are valid, but your conclusion (and >IBM's) are correct. Computer chess is not artificial intelligence, for >reasons that computer chess programs will find obvious. In the beginning >of the 1980's, Douglas Hofstadter claimed that a computer that plays at >a master level would need to have intelligence, in the sense that do >that it would have to have, as a necessary by-product, general >capabilities exceeding chess that are intuitively interpreted as >intelligence. This simply happens not to be true (fortunately for us >programmers), and Hofstadter has changed his mind. > I totally disagree. Every AI book I have in my office convers alpha/beta, minimax, best-first, depth-first, etc. So maybe the brute-force type of search they use doesn't match what some would like to have AI become, but that hardly means that chess programs are *not* "AI". IE, my AI texts say that minimax is a valid AI search algorithm... therefore the program it is used in as an AI program. A common misconception is that a "real AI" program somehow has to "do it like a human." There is *no* such constraint in the world of AI. Only that the program must exhibit some measurable form of expertise in the area under investigation. The most common "test" has been the so-called "Turing test"... Which does *not* measure "how" a program does what it does, only that it does it in a way that is indistinguishable from a human, when you only consider the final results (the moves played). >I do think that other games are better candidates than chess. The sort >of capabilities needed to play chess well turn out to be a bit >one-dimensional, although this was not obvious twenty years ago. I think >Bridge is a much better candidate. Although it's not as deep and complex >as chess, it's deep enough, and the capabilities needed to play it >strongly cannot be covered by a clever search algorithm: Information >passing, positive and negative inferences, playing with intent of >revealing or hiding information, and other features of this game make it >much more difficult for computers, and maybe require true intelligence. >It's hard to imagine a master-level bridge program that is not a stone's >throw from understanding natural language, and if you have that, I don't >care if you can unplug it or set it on fire. > >Amir
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