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I remember reading the first chapter on an AI book during college which laid out the objectives of AI research into two schools of thought.The first school of t

I remember reading the first chapter on an AI book during college which laid out the objectives of AI research into two schools of thought.The first school of thought believes that AI can be achieved by mimicking real conscious beings. Remember when man first tried to fly, most devices mimicked birds and failed horribly. The other school of thought believes that intelligence has well-defined principles, when discovered, would produce real intelligence (not mimicry), having the effect that the final product may not resemble what we see on day to day basis. Compare planes, which use the principles of flight, to the early flapping machines. A bird and plane both fly but they are very different in the way they do it. Approaching flight from the mimicry angle is hard, it's only recently in the last 10 years we have made light-weight flapping machines that fly well;yet we have had planes for over a hundred years once we knew the principles. Transcripts would be handy. I doubt a conversation with a 13 year old boy is a good way to measure AI? It's not the best metric to have but it is the most universal and most widely agreed on that we have. It seems like we are happier with small gains in mimicry for now, since real intelligence is hard. Really hard.

acchow 12y ago
> The first school of thought believes that AI can be achieved by mimicking real conscious beings It's important to note the true meaning behind this school of thought - that mimicry and "true" intelligence are actually equivalent. Behaviorists believe this, and the validity of the Turing Test along with it.
- swombat 12y ago
  I think it might actually be in Civ5 that I first heard the following quote: "Asking whether a computer can think is about as useful as asking whether a submarine can swim." I think this is fairly insightful and relevant.
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    That's from Djigstra. I digress. Most of the times, mimicking Nature works very well. We tend to always remember our most spectacular failure, but that's a selection bias.
    - Houshalter 12y ago
      Cars don't run like horses, solar panels don't use photosynthesis, engines don't work like muscles, computers don't look like biological neurons, etc, etc.
    - andreasvc 12y ago
      His name is Dijkstra. I'm curious how you arrive at the conclusion that mimicking nature works most of the time, do you have some examples?
      - marcosdumay 12y ago
        Looks like the post is too old, and I can't correct it anymore. On my defense, I was quite tired when I wrote it. You don't have to go very far looking for examples. The fictional Nautilus submarine was named after the animal Julio Verne copied its depth control system (the same one all real submarines use till today). Also, the first submarines' shape copied whales, a design that was adapted (but not completely replaced) because it does not work as well witout also copying their propulsion system. By the way, birds wings are better than planes ones in several important ways (but worse in a few others). We don't copy them because we don't have good enough materials, not because it's not a good idea.
- andreasvc 12y ago
  The wording of your comment reveals your bias towards the other school of thought, Strong AI. But what is "true" intelligence? I don't think anyone has a clear definition of this, and in reality it's all just a philosophical quagmire. An important distinction is whether mimicry is equivalent to "true" intelligence, or whether it should be treated as such, barring a better litmus test. With that in mind, taking a methodologically agnostic perspective of adequately reproducing behavior that is predicated as intelligence seems like a much more reasonable goal to me.
  - Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
    Strong AI wouldn't make same silly mistakes which people make all the time. So would the Strong AI need to be smart enough to play dumb to fool people? Because people are illogical, smart machines surely wouldn't be?
    - andreasvc 12y ago
      A Strong AI is by definition more intelligent than humans, so it could also deceive. No need to "be illogical", just playing along. In any case it's rather irrelevant, because presumably if there is a Strong AI, it would be so impressive that there is no need for a Turing test to prove it.
datawander 12y ago
That book you read was Russell and Norvig, it's one of the best textbooks ever written on any subject: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/
thedevopsguy 12y ago
Remember this book too. It's a classic text in AI. I think what they were trying to say in the intro is that the approach has a significant effect on how much effort is wasted. The engineering effort required to get a plane of the ground using moving wings is considerably greater than using rotational parts like propellers. Imagine how many decades would have been wasted to scale an orthinopter to handle the load of a passanger jet. This makes me think that AI research isn't going to be a gradual process of research being built on other research but it will be a eureka or an ah-ha moment that changes everything.

acchow 12y ago

> The first school of thought believes that AI can be achieved by mimicking real conscious beings It's important to note the true meaning behind this school of thought - that mimicry and "true" intelligence are actually equivalent. Behaviorists believe this, and the validity of the Turing Test along with it.

swombat 12y ago
I think it might actually be in Civ5 that I first heard the following quote: "Asking whether a computer can think is about as useful as asking whether a submarine can swim." I think this is fairly insightful and relevant.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  That's from Djigstra. I digress. Most of the times, mimicking Nature works very well. We tend to always remember our most spectacular failure, but that's a selection bias.
  - Houshalter 12y ago
    Cars don't run like horses, solar panels don't use photosynthesis, engines don't work like muscles, computers don't look like biological neurons, etc, etc.
  - andreasvc 12y ago
    His name is Dijkstra. I'm curious how you arrive at the conclusion that mimicking nature works most of the time, do you have some examples?
    - marcosdumay 12y ago
      Looks like the post is too old, and I can't correct it anymore. On my defense, I was quite tired when I wrote it. You don't have to go very far looking for examples. The fictional Nautilus submarine was named after the animal Julio Verne copied its depth control system (the same one all real submarines use till today). Also, the first submarines' shape copied whales, a design that was adapted (but not completely replaced) because it does not work as well witout also copying their propulsion system. By the way, birds wings are better than planes ones in several important ways (but worse in a few others). We don't copy them because we don't have good enough materials, not because it's not a good idea.
andreasvc 12y ago
The wording of your comment reveals your bias towards the other school of thought, Strong AI. But what is "true" intelligence? I don't think anyone has a clear definition of this, and in reality it's all just a philosophical quagmire. An important distinction is whether mimicry is equivalent to "true" intelligence, or whether it should be treated as such, barring a better litmus test. With that in mind, taking a methodologically agnostic perspective of adequately reproducing behavior that is predicated as intelligence seems like a much more reasonable goal to me.
- Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
  Strong AI wouldn't make same silly mistakes which people make all the time. So would the Strong AI need to be smart enough to play dumb to fool people? Because people are illogical, smart machines surely wouldn't be?
  - andreasvc 12y ago
    A Strong AI is by definition more intelligent than humans, so it could also deceive. No need to "be illogical", just playing along. In any case it's rather irrelevant, because presumably if there is a Strong AI, it would be so impressive that there is no need for a Turing test to prove it.

datawander 12y ago

That book you read was Russell and Norvig, it's one of the best textbooks ever written on any subject: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

thedevopsguy 12y ago

Remember this book too. It's a classic text in AI. I think what they were trying to say in the intro is that the approach has a significant effect on how much effort is wasted. The engineering effort required to get a plane of the ground using moving wings is considerably greater than using rotational parts like propellers. Imagine how many decades would have been wasted to scale an orthinopter to handle the load of a passanger jet. This makes me think that AI research isn't going to be a gradual process of research being built on other research but it will be a eureka or an ah-ha moment that changes everything.