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Re: What is AI?

 

Well, Artificial Intelligence. What makes it special?
In first place: it is commonly assumed that what makes us humans
special is our ability to perform rational thinking. Other animals
live on their instincts and what they learn in their life. We can
create new knowledge, get to really know something.
Compare using a language phrasebook to get around in China to actually
knows chinese, to know every meaning of what you are saying and how
does it relate to other characters, and being able to formulate
sentences outside of the ones you've heard or learnt. That is that
difference.

So that same difference is what I think applies to AI. Learning and
going further. In the case of a full fledged human mind-level neuronal
AI, this difference is evident, but in a more limited case, our
project (at least for now) we still consider it AI. Where is the
boundary? I think that isn't quite clear and there are degrees of AI
strenght, i.e. from 0 being a dumb printf("Hello World"); to 100 being
something as smart as us. (And that could go over 100 (and 9000) if
the machine can self improve and etc...).

Wintermute does attempt to understand knowledge via a database and
means to establish relations in content it receives, via Panlingua.
Now "Glass" is not an entry in a table like Glass:"Substance made of
SiO2..." It's now a mutable object that has atributes such as
breakable, can also mean container of liquids and any others you can
think of. So when you say "Is this glass full of water?" Wintermute's
understanding of that is closer to ours than the one of a non AI
program. Relations between meanings.
A spam filter searches for patterns and categorizes that as spam.
Wintermute would also do that, but find more patterns inside the spam
it rejects, and the mails it let go through; being able to understand
relations inside the text gives WM an advantage over a system that
just reads and matches text against said patterns.

In the case of facial recognition, the problem is far more complex
than bardcodes, just because barcodes are designed to be read by
machines. A standarized format of black and white stripes. Faces the
result of many factors and we have to adapt our detections techniques
to them, while we can adapt barcodes so that they can be easily read.
In fact, as far as I know, face detection currently works by
extracting the most important features of the face ("Eigenface"), the
same way you would get eigenvalues outta of a matrix in Algebra. Is
doing the math, basically. You need quite a large matrix to scan a
face, while if you follow that approach with barcodes, a smaller one
will suffice. And of course, variations in lightning, angle and small
changes in the face can make the whole process even more difficult
versus the simplicity of realatively immutable barcodes. How does a
program knows that this other pic it's me with a beard and that other
one it's not me but looks quite a lot like me?. Training. Learning.

Not to be able to do something, but to understand why you're doing it,
how could you make it better, what are you doing wrong. That's what a
program should do or emulate to learn as we do.

BTW, I'm back ;D

El día 12 de junio de 2011 20:30, SII <dante.ashton@xxxxxxxxxx> escribió:
> Because trying to assemble a psych meeting through IRC has been somewhat
> bad, I thought it best to start a discussion on here.
> Artificial Intelligence: AI. Defined, roughly, by programming computers to
> perform tasks normally reserved for humans.
> But what of a more in-depth definition? Why is Wintermute so special, yet a
> spam filter isn't?
> Why is the idea of facial recognition more appetizing then that of barcode
> recognition?
> Why is it that we can point to any chat-bot; AIML or not, and call that AI,
> yet so ignore far more complex processes and daemons running in order to
> keep our world turning?
> The problem of defining AI is, it seems, very much like defining life; you
> can point to yourself, a pet, or anything classed as a microrganism, and say
> "That's life."
> A set of chemicals, however, isn't. It's just chemicals. When does a bag of
> adrenaline turn into anger? When does cortisol turn into worry? The
> definition here is as fuzzy as the defintion of  system vs. an intelligent
> system, no?
> Discuss, chaps.
> -Dante
>
>



-- 
José Luis Ricón


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