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Subject: Re: What is AI?

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 21:57:01 12/17/99

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Intelligence is the ability to generalize.  The "artificial" part doesn't have
to refer to computers but let's limit it at that.

So the domain involves programs that can handle general cases which may be
unforeseen by the programmer.

1) A language recognition program could be AI since it has to deal with all
sorts of sounds and make sense out of them.

2) An algorithmic airplane pilot for a computer war game could be AI since it
has to deal with a large variety of strategies that could be employed to defeat
it.

3) A chess program is AI since it has to be able to handle an extremely wide
variety of possible chess games.

A problem with AI is that some people hope that study of AI will provide insight
into human processes, and perhaps they are involved in the field primarily for
this reason.

Originally, chess was assumed to require such a high degree of generalization
that it was thought that a mastery of chess would require a great deal of
understanding of human processes.

Computer chess programs are AI, they are extremely good at generalizing within
their specific domain.  But the techniques commonly used to achieve this end
don't apply to a lot of other domains, specifically they don't apply to the
human domain, and therefore the AI people who care about humans are bored with
chess, and they have moved on to games that they think will require more
simulation of (and therefore more understanding of) human processes to program.

bruce



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