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The end of AI winter?

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Re: The end of AI winter?

#61

Post by [deleted] »

Tichy wrote: post #54
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…

The DARPA car racing thing seems to be a breakthrough. Granted, 30 years ago people would have expected more. But it is more than just a chess algorithm.

[deleted]

Re: The end of AI winter?

#62

Post by Maro »

"DARPA has also supported programs on the Semantic Web with a great deal of emphasis on intelligent management of content and automated understanding. However James Hendler who was the manager of the DARPA program at the time has expressed some disappointment with the outcome of the programe."

The Semantic Web is not a good use-case in terms of reputation for modern AI..

Re: The end of AI winter?

#63

Post by borism »

Tichy wrote: post #54
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…

The DARPA car racing thing seems to be a breakthrough. Granted, 30 years ago people would have expected more. But it is more than just a chess algorithm.

DARPA Grand Challenge? How's that a breakthrough in AI? Sure, it's uses a lot of results of "AI" research, but there's nothing revolutionary about that.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#64

Post by Maro »

berntb wrote: post #35
WilliamLP wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spe…

The comparison to insects is very interesting. Now that you said it, it's easy to make a connection between stupid bugs that fly into the light, into windows, walls and simplistic Quake bots or automated vacuum cleaners.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#65

Post by jimbokun »

catzaa wrote: post #36
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.

"It seems that a large part of AI is thinking up new functions with parameters to be tuned."

Doesn't that encompass all of Computer Science?

Re: The end of AI winter?

#66

Post by Tichy »

borism wrote: post #63
Tichy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DARPA car racing thing seems to be a breakthrough. Granted, 30 years ago people would have expected more. But it is more than just a chess algorithm.

DARPA Grand Challenge? How's that a breakthrough in AI? Sure, it's uses a lot of results of "AI" research, but there's nothing revolutionary about that.

My understanding is that they made a big leap during the challenge - from catastrophic performance in the first run, to several successful drivers in the second run.

Revolutionary or not, I don't think it was trivial to make an autonomous vehicle.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#67

Post by randallsquared »

eru wrote: post #56
randallsquared wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best defintion of "free will" basically boils down to "unpredictable in detail absent simulation". This sounds weird at first, but the results probably match your intuitive understanding of free will. Given that, I think that any general intelligence approaching human level will have free will. That doesn't mean that it won't have certain goals, though it remains to be seen whether it will be possible to…

Would a good Pseudo-Random number generator satisfy your definition? (By the way, humans, when asked directly for random numbers, are terrible at the task.)

Well, it satisfies the "free" part, but probably not the "will" part, which implies reasons for actions. I'm not actually sure humans have free will under my definition, but I think we probably do. It could be that some algorithm that's much simpler than an actual human could predict in detail what a given human will do without simulation, in which case I'd be forced to admit that humans don't have free will by my definition.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#68

Post by berntb »

Maro wrote: post #64
berntb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 spe…

The comparison to insects is very interesting. Now that you said it, it's easy to make a connection between stupid bugs that fly into the light, into windows, walls and simplistic Quake bots or automated vacuum cleaners.

Not new. I quoted Moravec earlier in this thread. Check him out and his arguments about how closely connected computer speed is to complex AI behavior.

(I don't know how correct it is, but Moravec made the predictions decades ago and they seem to follow the development curves quite well.)

Re: The end of AI winter?

#69

Post by StrawberryFrog »

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

Ever read Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" and "The Language Instinct"? He makes good arguments that the human brain doesn't have "generalized intelligence", it has a lot of specific modules, and is less like a single organ for thinking, more like a system of organs that work together.

Ever considered that progress in "generalised" AI may come about when there are enough "specific" AI modules developed that can be joined up?

Re: The end of AI winter?

#70

Post by scott_s »

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…

Evidence Points To Conscious 'Metacognition' In Some Nonhuman Animals: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830430
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