Technology
Human-Level Artificial Intelligence? Be Serious!
I claim that achieving real human-level artificial intelligence would necessarily imply that most of the tasks that humans perform for pay could be automated. Rather than work toward this goal of automation by building special-purpose systems, I argue for the development of general-purpose, educable systems that can learn and be taught to perform any of the thousands of jobs that humans can perform. Joining others who have made similar proposals, I advocate beginning with a system that has minimal, although extensive, built-in capabilities. These would have to include the ability to improve through learning along with many other abilities.
If Not Turing's Test, Then What?
If it is true that good problems produce good science, then it will be worthwhile to identify good problems, and even more worthwhile to discover the attributes that make them good problems. This discovery process is necessarily empirical, so we examine several challenge problems, beginning with Turing's famous test, and more than a dozen attributes that challenge problems might have. We are led to a contrast between research strategies -- the successful "divide and conquer" strategy and the promising but largely untested "developmental" strategy -- and we conclude that good challenge problems encourage the latter strategy.
The 2005 AAAI Classic Paper Awards
Mitchell, Tom, Levesque, Hector
Mitchell and Levesque provide commentary on the two AAAI Classic Paper awards, given at the AAAI-05 conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The two winning papers were "Quantifying the Inductive Bias in Concept Learning," by David Haussler, and "Default Reasoning, Nonmonotonic Logics, and the Frame Problem," by Steve Hanks and Drew McDermott.
The Future of AI -- A Manifesto
The long-term goal of AI is human-level AI. This is still not directly definable, although we still know of human abilities that even the the best present programs on the fastest computers have not been able to emulate, such as playing master-level go and learning science from the Internet. Basic researchers in AI should measure their work as to the extent to which it advances this goal.
A (Very) Brief History of Artificial Intelligence
In this brief history, the beginnings of artificial intelligence are traced to philosophy, fiction, and imagination. Early inventions in electronics, engineering, and many other disciplines have influenced AI. Some early milestones include work in problems solving which included basic work in learning, knowledge representation, and inference as well as demonstration programs in language understanding, translation, theorem proving, associative memory, and knowledge-based systems. The article ends with a brief examination of influential organizations and current issues facing the field.
Probabilistic Hybrid Action Models for Predicting Concurrent Percept-driven Robot Behavior
Most autonomous robots are equipped with restricted, unreliable, and inaccurate sensors and effectors and operate in complex and dynamic environments. A successful approach to deal with the resulting uncertainty is the use of controllers that prescribe the robots' behavior in terms of concurrent reactive plans (CRPs) -- plans that specify how the robots are to react to sensory input in order to accomplish their jobs reliably (e.g., McDermott, 1992a; Beetz, 1999). Reactive plans are successfully used to produce situation specific behavior, to detect problems and recover from them automatically, and to recognize and exploit opportunities (Beetz et al., 2001). These kinds of behaviors are particularly important for autonomous robots that have only uncertain information about the world, act in dynamically changing environments, and are to accomplish complex tasks efficiently. Besides reliability and flexibility, foresight is another important capability of competent autonomous robots (McDermott, 1992a).
AI in the News
Alonzo Church and Alan Turing The items in this collage were selected September 26, 2005 (www.latimes.com). But there is a realm beyond the exhibit chiefly covers the 50 years of Grand Challenge played out, with 195 the classical computer: the quantum. The efforts to teach a machine to play a teams entering the competition, five probabilistic nature of quantum theory allows quintessentially human pastime culminating teams successfully completing the course atoms and other quantum objects to in the Deep Blue-Kasparov match." The New York and even highschool students but can also be 0 and 1 at the same Times. What are the Limits of Learning .com). "The Stanford scientists who led the vehicles.