Artificial Intelligence Has a Strange New Muse: Our Sense of Smell

Today's artificial intelligence systems, including the artificial neural networks broadly inspired by the neurons and connections of the nervous system, perform wonderfully at tasks with known constraints. They also tend to require a lot of computational power and vast quantities of training data. That all serves to make them great at playing chess or Go, at detecting if there's a car in an image, at differentiating between depictions of cats and dogs. "But they are rather pathetic at composing music or writing short stories," said Konrad Kording, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. "They have great trouble reasoning meaningfully in the world." Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.