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I find it weird to see people calling A* an 'AI technique'... Is BFS or DFS an AI technique too? I thought it's merely a search algorithm...
by gwnywg 3y ago
I find it weird to see people calling A* an 'AI technique'... Is BFS or DFS an AI technique too? I thought it's merely a search algorithm...
- svachalek 3y agoAI is the cutting edge of CS. When it's well understood it stops being AI. Some day LLM and neural nets will get the same reaction... who calls LLM "AI"? It's just a formula!
- nuc1e0n 3y agoQuite. One of the best uses I've seen for LLMs is for NPC dialog in computer games.
- vekker 3y agoIs it really though? I feel like it's mostly non-technical people who think this, because back when I was a CS student, AI was just a big field of study that included many types of problem solving, from simple to complex, including all types of search such as A*.
- ashiban 3y agoMost likely for historical reasons where A* was used alot in games path finding for in-game AI characters
- furyofantares 3y agoI first learned it in the famous book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by Peter Norvig. I think 3 chapters are dedicated to search. A lot of AI can be framed as search, and a whole lot of historical AI, or mundane present AI, is straightforward search.
- Ukv 3y agoWhen it was published, A* was considered within the field of AI. The paper[0]'s authors were from Stanford's AI group. The "AI effect"[1] describes how the field tends to get left with only the cutting-edge research. [0]: http://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/OnlinePubs-Nils/PublishedPapers/astar.pdf http://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/OnlinePubs-Nils/PublishedPap... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- T-A 3y agoBy way of [1], here [2] is a paper about A* also posted under CS/AI. It introduces "Q* search, a search algorithm that uses deep Q-networks to guide search" and uses it "to solve the Rubik's cube", the thing which Gary Marcus complained about OpenAI not having done with a neural network in 2019. As pointed out by techbro92 [3] the authors do not seem to be affiliated with OpenAI, but AFAIK nobody claimed that OpenAI invented Q*. It's not hard to imagine OpenAI trying it out with their Rubik-solving robot hand and then starting to think about other things it might be applied to. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38395959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38395959 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04518 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04518 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38398243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38398243
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI still think the "AI effect" is bullshit. A* was/is AI under a different meaning - it's what understood as "AI" in computer games, where the point is for the computer opponent to pretend to be smarter than a brick, and literally any trick, cheat or heuristic used to do that is part of "AI". A*? Obviously AI. Random walk? Yes. Fuzzy logic? Yes. State machines? Yes.
- Ukv 3y agoTrue that A* would later go on to be used in computer game bots (as LLMs may eventually be) where "an AI" doesn't necessarily correspond to the field of AI, but A* was still within what was understood to be the field of AI at the time it was published. The meaning shifting over time, and the reason for which it shifts, is the AI effect. Heuristic-guided pathfinding is no longer what's meant by AI, IBM Deep Blue's alpha–beta search is no longer what's meant by AI, and I'd claim it's even shifting away from earlier image classifiers in favor of only generative models like GPT4.
- naasking 3y agoSearch is 100% key to AI, even historically. Prolog has its roots in AI research, and Prolog evaluation is a form of unification, which is a search.
- lagrange77 3y agoI think (probabilistic) logic programming also relies on graph traversal/path searching, which is part of the symbolic AI paradigm.
- flohofwoe 3y agoProbably because of A*'s popularity for path finding in game development. Everything that imitates human-like behaviour in games is called "AI", even when most of it is just a big messy hairball of adhoc if-else code under the hood ;)
- OJFord 3y agoThere's no magic in 'AI', all of it can be described as something else. The whole of ML is 'just statistics', especially classification. (That said I was and I suppose am a bit of a sceptic because of that. But mainly I think because to me it's more useful to call a spade a spade and say we're doing some advanced blah stats to blah. Helps explain, onboard, and motivate the next generation (who likes stats at school? But if that's how AI works, oh suddenly it's cool). Demystify it. If you're just searching over Levenshtein distance [to a technical audience] say that, don't start waffling about 'AI'.)
- x86x87 3y agoYes,ultimately everything is just a bunch of ifs. Wired together in a very complicated fashion but ultimately a bunch of ifs.
- terminous 3y agoLinear regression is AI.