Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 22:47:39 01/27/98
Go up one level in this thread
On January 28, 1998 at 00:41:26, Don Dailey wrote: >But the real problem with these discussions (in my opinion) is that >there is no definition of intelligence we agree on. Everyone THINKS >they know the answer intuitively but I'll bet everyone has a different >idea (highly internalized in their heads) about what it really is. This is the cause of all of the randomness, but it is a hard topic. Even the definition in the OED is pretty lame (a whole page of it). At least I think so. I was trying to read it without using a manifying glass. This whole mess started over an article that discusses the issue of whether or not Deep Blue, and by extension, any normal chess program, uses techniques that could properly be considered to be in the domain of artificial intelligence. The author of the article says yes, IBM's web site says no. What caused the real problem was the KK's assertion that the author of the article said that Deep Blue is intelligent. This assertion was not true, but by then we were all off to the races. This kind of thing is what the internet is all about. I am not a big Carl Sagan fan, but in one of his books, I believe it was The Dragons of Eden, I think he suggested that intelligence is an individual's capacity for adaptation. Sorry for the vagueness but I read all of his stuff in approximately 1980. Personally, I think this definition is a good one, better than the one in the OED at describing this part of the word's meaning. I think this definition is a good reference point when you try to figure out what artificial intelligence is. One of the posters in this thread has mentioned that he thinks that AI has to do with solving problems that require a lot of generalization. I agree with this, I had come to this conclusion independently. The reason chess was interesting to AI researchers is that it is hard to understand any one position, and there are a huge number of positions that need to be understood in order to play the game *well*. A program that plays chess has to be very adaptable. In order to attack this problem people used min-max search and end-point evaluation. This is an attempt to apply a generalized heuristic approach to the game of chess. Problem is that it worked, and improvements have come for free along with improvements in hardware capacity, so people haven't had to resort to anything fancier in order to play a strong game. The reason AI people are bummed about computer chess is that the systems that perform best are not generalized enough to interest them. More generalized systems can't out-peform the more specific chess programs as of yet. So I agree with the author of the article. This stuff is AI, but it's not cutting-edge AI, although it's all cutting-edge computer chess of course. bruce
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.