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The end of AI winter?

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Re: The end of AI winter?

#31

Post by hegemonicon »

csallen wrote: post #8
lux wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think another problem is the expectation of what AI will look like at all. We think of intelligent human-like robots like something from science fiction, when in reality AI could just be a bit of code running on a standard machine with specific and likely specialized inputs and outputs. Think of an AI machine working with atmospheric data as one "sense" combined with seismic data and some others, with the directed…

I took a class with leading AI researcher Patrick Winston in the spring... it really is one of the most fascinating fields right now. If there is to truly be an "AI spring" then it will likely require massive collaboration between not just computer scientists, but researchers in a wide span of fields including neuroscientists, general biologists, psychologists, and even philosophers. Free will and emotions are other…

There's nothing particularly magical about emotion - it's just a low level computation by our subconscious that we don't have conscious access to. Happiness, anger, fear, etc are all responses to the environment we evolved because they produce (or at least, did at one time) useful actions. It's the mechanism the brain used to make predictions based on data before it developed a consciousness.

An AI would make predictions based on data just like a human would, but the mechanism it used to do it would certainly be different.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#32

Post by hegemonicon »

WilliamLP wrote: post #21

> machine translation, data mining, industrial robotics, logistics, speech recognition, banking software, medical diagnosis and Google's search engine, to name a few. Do these things really directly descend from pure AI reasearch? Or are they really the result of a bunch of clever, yet extremely specialized algorithms, independently developed, combined with an incredible increase in hardware power? Not to say such th…

EURISKO is a development in the last 30 years (though just barely).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko

Re: The end of AI winter?

#33

Post by [deleted] »

WilliamLP wrote: post #27
lliiffee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From an outside perspective it seems the "God of the gaps" argument - AI is what AI researchers haven't done yet - is used as a smokescreen to cover up that AI research hasn't really done much in the last 30 years. Here is what you don't understand: There are very, very, very few people who do research on "AI". People research medical diagnosis, or search, or data mining, or speech recognition, or vision, or chess.…

The trouble with that argument is that if you'd have asked anyone (anyone!), in any AI related field in 1980, where AI would be in thirty years what would they have said? Surely not "Well, for instance one of the greatest achievements might be that we will work on chess algorithms, and we will see some incremental improvements resulting from tweaking certain heuristics and more intelligent pruning through more specia…

[deleted]

Re: The end of AI winter?

#34

Post by lliiffee »

WilliamLP wrote: post #27
lliiffee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From an outside perspective it seems the "God of the gaps" argument - AI is what AI researchers haven't done yet - is used as a smokescreen to cover up that AI research hasn't really done much in the last 30 years. Here is what you don't understand: There are very, very, very few people who do research on "AI". People research medical diagnosis, or search, or data mining, or speech recognition, or vision, or chess.…

The trouble with that argument is that if you'd have asked anyone (anyone!), in any AI related field in 1980, where AI would be in thirty years what would they have said? Surely not "Well, for instance one of the greatest achievements might be that we will work on chess algorithms, and we will see some incremental improvements resulting from tweaking certain heuristics and more intelligent pruning through more specia…

My point is that there IS no serious "pure" AI research these days. Your image of lots of pure AI researchers wasting their time is a fantasy-- those people don't exist. People work on applications.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#35

Post by berntb »

WilliamLP wrote: post #29
StrawberryFrog wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do these things really directly descend from pure AI research? Or are they really the result of a bunch of clever, yet extremely specialized algorithms, independently developed, combined with an incredible increase in hardware power? Is there a meaningful difference? There's a good case to be made that the human mind (AKA "natural intelligence") is "a bunch of clever, yet extremely specialized algorithms, independent…

The difference is techniques that are developed for special purposes, but turn out to be useful for more general cases, versus techniques that become more and more specialized, resulting in a decreased possibility of ever using them for anything but increasingly specialized areas. Perhaps the human brain's neural wiring that was required for throwing could have been, and was, subverted into something else. Better neg…

>>What seems to have died is the dream of any kind of useful generalized intelligence. Any kind!

This looks strange, could you elaborate?

Right now, we seems to be just a few years away from a new age in robotics. They will have some self learning, but at first not be much smarter than insects.

For instance, there are cheap systems that can (roughly) understand what they see. And yes, the robot vision systems are specially built for that -- but the same functionality in animals has afaik also lots of specially built hardware.

Does it really matter if we have to specially build systems, if we can e.g. make system-building-systems as smart tools?

Edit: Some syntax and word choices, etc. Also, on consideration, I make the same point as the GP (StrawberryFrog), but he does it better.

Edit 2: Hmm... Another argument, then: Even if generalized learning will work in practice, it will probably be inferior to networked systems where problems are automatically found and then solved (and updated) from a central location -- like bugs in operating systems. Since everything will be on the net soon, all future generations of robots will probably work like this.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#36

Post by catzaa »

ct4ul4u wrote: post #5

I am confident that ongoing over-promising will make AI winter a continuing reality.

> will make AI winter a continuing reality.

This will be a good thing. Theoretical development thrived under the AI “winter”.

I am going to throw the rooster in the hen house and say it: It seems that a large part of AI is thinking up new functions with parameters to be tuned. These parameters are called something exotic and words “neural” and “network” is used liberally.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#37

Post by jcl »

tomjen2 wrote: post #16
Confusion wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't actually clear whether intelligence is anything other than some emergent phenomenon of suitable connected 'simple heuristics' and 'learning algorithms'. If you as me, we also are overglorified Eliza's.

There is one big difference: we can reason about reason (meta reason), Eliza can't. It is not a difference in degree, it is a difference in kind and seems to be unique to higher primates (you can learn a dog to do tricks, but it won't spend its time coming up with new tricks), one of the most interesting science videos I have ever seen is one where a bonobo learns to write a symbol that had been on a computer it used…

We like to think we can reason about reason, but to some extent we are simply regurgitating prior knowledge, or trying some random combination of old concepts and getting lucky. If this were not the case, we wouldn't have had to wait until the 1900s for Godel's theorem -- we would each discover it independently during childhood. Godel was standing on the shoulders of giants, just as we are when we use his work, or set theory, or mathematical notation, or rules of logic, or language. In a way, our intelligence is the byproduct of a stochastic program that has been running for thousands of years consuming billions of terabytes of memory. It seems rather cruel to expect Eliza to match us under her more limited conditions.

And it is a difference in degree. A dog frequently comes up with new, previously unseen behavior -- burying certain objects, shredding toilet paper, etc. The problem is that most behaviors are not seen as useful by humans, hence they go unrewarded as "tricks". But there are also examples of dogs learning useful behavior on their own, from learning to bark something that sounds like "I love you", to learning to knock down an owner who is about to have a seizure, to learning to fetch the leash when it wants a walk.

Defining "intelligence" as "doing something that humans can do that animals and computers can't" seems somewhat self-centered (although I admittedly cannot think of a better one off the top of my head).

Re: The end of AI winter?

#38

Post by Agent101 »

WilliamLP wrote: post #29
StrawberryFrog wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do these things really directly descend from pure AI research? Or are they really the result of a bunch of clever, yet extremely specialized algorithms, independently developed, combined with an incredible increase in hardware power? Is there a meaningful difference? There's a good case to be made that the human mind (AKA "natural intelligence") is "a bunch of clever, yet extremely specialized algorithms, independent…

The difference is techniques that are developed for special purposes, but turn out to be useful for more general cases, versus techniques that become more and more specialized, resulting in a decreased possibility of ever using them for anything but increasingly specialized areas. Perhaps the human brain's neural wiring that was required for throwing could have been, and was, subverted into something else. Better neg…

I think the problem with building generalized intelligence is that it needs to built on a general platform, like the x86 architecture in flexibility but designed to be self-maintaining and self-upgradeable to the highest degree possible.

This means you kind of have to start from scratch as it is not backwards compatible (the idea of a superuser is baked into most archs), which is an enormous amount of effort.

I'm thinking about trying to start a "reboot computing" campaign to get people to think about how we could improve computing if we didn't have backward compatibility to worry about (different security archs, self-maintenance etc).

Re: The end of AI winter?

#39

Post by camccann »

dhs wrote: post #19
jacquesm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see search engines as being 'vaguely related to artificial intelligence' at all.

Apparently Google's Peter Norvig does, e.g. http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-6754621605046052935&... (he starts talking about the relationship between Google and AI at 06:40).

Dr. Norvig is also one of the authors of a very well-regarded textbook on the current state of the AI field: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

Re: The end of AI winter?

#40

Post by chime »

lliiffee wrote: post #34
WilliamLP wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with that argument is that if you'd have asked anyone (anyone!), in any AI related field in 1980, where AI would be in thirty years what would they have said? Surely not "Well, for instance one of the greatest achievements might be that we will work on chess algorithms, and we will see some incremental improvements resulting from tweaking certain heuristics and more intelligent pruning through more specia…

My point is that there IS no serious "pure" AI research these days. Your image of lots of pure AI researchers wasting their time is a fantasy-- those people don't exist. People work on applications.

And yet there are numerous people who work on pure math and theoretical physics.
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