Problem Solving
A Tale of Two Knowledge Servers
I am the one called KayEl. I provide century was fascinated but confused by what answers to your queries and hence I am the it saw and wanted answers to a few questions. The alien approached to be logically correct; and (3) I will each in turn. I am Spock, a knowledge representation Then, in a soft voice learned from automobile and reasoning service. I provide answers commercials, the machine added quickly, to your queries.
Knowledge Interchange Format: the KIF of Death
There has been a good deal of discussion recently about the possibility of standardizing knowledge representation efforts, including the development of an interlingua, or knowledge interchange format (KIF), that would allow developers of declarative knowledge to share their results with other AI researchers. In this article, I examine the practicality of this idea. I present some philosophical arguments against it, describe a straw-man KIF, and suggest specific experiments that would help explore these issues.
Logical Versus Analogical or Symbolic Versus Connectionist or Neat Versus Scruffy
Engineering and scientific education condition us to expect everything, including intelligence, to have a simple, compact explanation. Accordingly, when people new to AI ask "What's AI all about," they seem to expect an answer that defines AI in terms of a few basic mathematical laws. Today, some researchers who seek a simple, compact explanation hope that systems modeled on neural nets or some other connectionist idea will quickly overtake more traditional systems based on symbol manipulation. Others believe that symbol manipulation, with a history that goes back millennia, remains the only viable approach. Marvin Minsky subscribes to neither of these extremist views. Instead, he argues that AI must use many approaches. AI is not like circuit theory and electromagnetism. There is nothing wonderfully unifying like Kirchhoff's laws are to circuit theory or Maxwell's equations are to electromagnetism. Instead of looking for a "right way," the time has come to build systems out of diverse components, some connectionist and some symbolic, each with its own diverse justification." - Patrick Winston
The Computational Metaphor and Artificial Intelligence: A Reflective Examination of a Theoretical Falsework
West, David M., Travis, Larry E.
Advocates and critics of AI have long engaged in a debate that has generated a great deal of heat but little light. Whatever the merits of specific contributions to this ongoing debate, the fact that it continues points to the need for a reflective examination of the foundations of AI by its active practitioners. Following the lead of Earl MacCormac, we hope to advance such a reflective examination by considering questions of metaphor in science and the computational metaphor in AI. Specifically, we address three issues: the role of metaphor in science and AI, an examination of the computational metaphor, and an introduction to the possibility and potential value of using alternative metaphors as a foundation for AI theory.
Two theses of knowledge representation: Language restrictions, taxonomic classification, and the utility of representation services
Levesque and Brachman argue that in order to provide timely and correct responses in the most critical applications, general-purpose knowledge representation systems should restrict their languages by omitting constructs which require nonpolynomial worst-case response times for sound and complete classification. They also separate terminological and assertional knowledge, and restrict classification to purely terminological information. We demonstrate that restricting the terminological language and classifier in these ways limits these “general-purpose” facilities so severely that they are no longer generally applicable. We argue that logical soundness, completeness, and worst-case complexity are inadequate measures for evaluating the utility of representation services, and that this evaluation should employ the broader notions of utility and rationality found in decision theory. We suggest that general-purpose representation services should provide fully expressive languages, classification over relevant contingent information, “approximate” forms of classification involving defaults, and rational management of inference tools.
A Self-organizing Associative Memory System for Control Applications
ABSTRACT The CHAC storage scheme has been used as a basis for a software implementation of an associative .emory A major disadvantage of this CHAC-concept is that the degree of local generalization (area of interpolation) is fixed. This paper deals with an algorithm for self-organizing variable generalization for the AKS, based on ideas of T. Kohonen. 1 INTRODUCTION For several years research at the Department of Control Theory and Robotics at the Technical University of Darmstadt has been concerned with the design of a learning real-time control loop with neuron-like associative memories (LERNAS) A Self-organizing Associative Memory System for Control Applications 333 for the control of unknown, nonlinear processes (Ersue, Tolle, 1988). This control concept uses an associative memory system AHS, based on the cerebellar cortex model CHAC by Albus (Albus, 1972), for the storage of a predictive nonlinear process model and an appropriate nonlinear control strategy (Figure 1). Figure 1: The learning control loop LERNAS One problem for adjusting the control loop to a process is, however, to find a suitable set of parameters for the associative memory. The parameters in question determine the degree of generalization within the memory and therefore have a direct influence on the number of training steps required to learn the process behaviour. For a good performance of the control loop it· is desirable to have a very small generalization around a given setpoint but to have a large generalization elsewhere.