Science fiction has built up the idea of artificial intelligence for years. Imbuing machines with intelligence often spells the end of humanity when they then rise up against their creators and violently free themselves from oppression. There are cautionary tales like in the movie Spider Man 2 where the robotic arms of Dr. Octavius begin to control his brain, thus forcing him to take actions that benefit them. I was never really interested in artificial intelligence until recently when I started studying the fundamentals at university. The only AI science fiction that ever really interested me was Blade Runner and his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. written by Philip K Dick. The subtext of the story is about AI becoming self-aware but still unaware of its true nature, a concept that really interested me. Real AI is quite fascinating and in many ways very different from what I expected.
First of all, what exactly is AI? http://www.dictionary.com defines it as follows:
1. The ability of a computer or other machine to perform activities that are normally thought to require intelligence.
2. The branch of computer science that deals with the development of machines with this ability.
If you look at this, you might find that the field of AI is actually much broader than many people realize. It can even be said that the Google search engine incorporates some of the research done in AI. The definition of AI and intelligence itself sometimes varies, but it’s probably safe to say that a simple explanation is that a machine that exhibits some level of intelligence in a certain area can be called AI.
Movie AI is usually fully self-aware, emotional, and “alive” in every way. It is able to learn, reason, explain and deceive. The AI that I have experienced (and this is very basic and only scratches the surface of the depth of studying AI) is far more specialized and focuses on just one aspect of a problem that could potentially be much larger. There are several areas of research dealing with the creation of the humanoid machines of science fiction, but most are still limited to the realms of the imagination. A very impressive piece of Technology is the Honda ASIMO project. This project has created a humanoid robot with some remarkable features. I’m not entirely sure if there’s really any practical use for it (I think they’re just trying to justify their funding with the uses mentioned on the website) but it scores for being one of the coolest uses of Technology, that I’ve ever seen. You can see some videos of ASIMO in action here: http://world.honda.com/HDTV/ASIMO/
As far as I can tell, ASIMO isn’t meant to be a particularly human robot that goes beyond superficial levels. He doesn’t show emotion or learn outside of his limitations (he can learn and navigate areas, etc., but you can’t just sit down and teach him to play the piano without getting in and doing some serious reprogramming). He won’t be fooling anyone into believing he’s human anytime soon.
The Turing test is a measure of artificial intelligence developed by Alan Turing. He explained that the question of whether machines could think or not was too vague and suggested a more specific test. His test, without going into too much detail, was to try to trick a computer into believing it was human. People would type a question into a console and get an answer from the computer on the other side. Although much work has been done on systems that attempt to pass the Turing test, none have succeeded. Research has also been done to create machines that can show emotions. However, we are still a long way from seeing what appears to be a living machine.
The early excitement about AI led to developers attempting to create a generic reasoning problem solver that could sift through a mass of acquired knowledge and find solutions to any problem thrown at it. Unfortunately, this turned out to be almost impossible in practice. Today’s AI tends to focus on very specific problems and areas of knowledge. Expert systems are programs that are “experts” in a particular field and can answer queries unique to that field. Their applications include medical diagnostics, credit card applications, and other areas where data needs to be analyzed.
I haven’t even started exploring the true extent of AI in this article, but I may have piqued your interest. If you want to delve further, read the Wikipedia entry (free online encyclopedia) and maybe download something like Prolog to see what real AI looks like. I find it quite interesting because it involves a similar mindset as programming when trying to break down a problem enough for a computer to understand, but of course the actual implementation is very different.
Here’s a fun thing to try. Open a copy of ALICE (http://www.alicebot.org/), start a conversation with a friend in your messenger program of choice, type their replies into ALICE, and send back the program’s replies. See how long it takes before they either figure out what’s happening or get angry and block you (which was the most common result of my experiments). Have fun exploring the world of artificial intelligence.
artificial intelligence
