Author: Vincent Vega
Date: 18:12:55 03/14/01
Go up one level in this thread
On March 14, 2001 at 03:20:07, Bruce Moreland wrote: >On March 13, 2001 at 19:06:27, HECTOR MUNOZ wrote: > >>There are some who might argue that a computer chess program is not a >>demonstration of intelligence in particular, a program which uses Shannon's >>Type A Approach. I need to present a solid argument that such a program >>does involve intelligence. > >Everyone tries to answer this question without figuring out what they mean by >"intelligence" first. > >The OED definition takes the better part of a page, and gives various usages >dating back to 1390, although some aspects of the word are extremely new. In >particular, the use of the term "intelligence quotient" is said to date back >only to 1921, as expressed in English. That's the part of the definition that >gets everyone tied up in knots these days. > >The first definition is "[t]he faculty of understanding; intellect." The second >one is "[u]nderstanding as a quality of admitting of degree; spec. superior >understanding; quickness of mental apprehension, sagacity." The others don't >seem to apply much. > >I don't think the dictionary is very helpful here. This word seems too large >for the dictionary. Perhaps someone has written a book or an article that gets >to the point, but failing that, I'll take a crack at it, as it relates to >computer programs. Well, most posts so far have made a direct or indirect mention of the fact that "intelligence" is a very hard concept to define. The discussion about the difference between intelligence and IQ, etc., has been played out over and over hundreds of times on the Net so I don't find it too interesting to go into these general cases again. Defining chess-specific intelligence is much more interesting though. > >I believe that intelligence is displayed if a program can generalize effectively >within a sufficiently complex problem domain. It's not enough to be able to >handle specific cases, it must be possible to be effective in a wide variety of >cases, via the use of general-purpose code. > >Chess, a game that has fascinated humans for hundreds of years in its current >form, and much longer if we allow for precursor forms, seems like it would >qualify as a sufficiently difficult domain. Humans devote their lives to the >game and the game remains fresh and challenging. I disagree. Chess is an extremely limited problem domain. The fact that it is interesting and difficult for humans doesn't make it any less limited. Successful chess approaches have not been successful in other turn-based, full-information, finite games like Go, not to even mention less similar problems. > >I believe that the current programs generalize very well. They can play >essentially any position. I disagree. They barely generalize at all. Generalization is inferring rules from particular cases. Most programs do it rarely, if at all, instead the programmer or his references do it and the program simply uses these ready-made rules. >There are some that cause them problems, but there >are a great many that they play well enough to challenge a strong human when the >human plays against the program, and they can be used even by very strong humans >in order to provide insight in very difficult positions. These positions are >rarely foreseen by the program's author, but the program is still very >effective. This is not an example of the ability to generalize. I don't think you can argue that these insights are caused by any generalization ability. Instead, I think that other abilities like quickly and accurately classifying positions, having great memory capacity and calculation speed, or having access to large databases of ready-made solutions make their insights useful. > >I think that intelligence is essentially the ability to effectively handle >difficult specific cases with general-purpose methods, and the chess domain, >while very specific, is rich enough that it requires the ability to generalize >in order to tackle the wide variety of practical cases a program is apt to face. Handling special cases with general-purpose methods is not generalization. Creating these methods is and few programs do it. Even if they were able to do it well, I still wouldn't call them "intelligent" because I find chess to be way too limited of a domain. > >Copyright (C) Bruce Moreland, 2001. All rights reserved. Permission to use all >or part of the above in a homework assignment is given only under the condition >that any quotation is accurately attributed. > >bruce
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