[extropy-chat] Re: Any progress towards AI at all?

[Dirk Bruere]

On 10/14/05, J. Andrew Rogers <andrew at ceruleansystems.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/10/05 2:11 AM, "Eugen Leitl" <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 10:11:59PM -0700, J. Andrew Rogers wrote:
> >> To an outsider, little has changed in the last decade in AI. To an
> insider,
> >> theoretical progress in the last five years or so has been hyperactive
> and
> >> qualitative. This sea change just is not something that is easily seen
> or
> >
> > How do we measure that progress, however? Do we have benchmarks on
> practical
> > systems? I don't see much progress in practice, but I'm admittedly not
> looking
> > very hard (it would be a full-time job).
>
>
> For almost the entire history of AI research, there has been no coherent
> general theoretical model for intelligent systems. In the last few years,
> something that looks very much like a comprehensive theoretical
> description
> and framework for intelligent systems in the abstract has been coalescing
> very nicely. The net effect is that it is starting to transition from
> looking like a really hard theoretical problem to a really hard
> engineering
> problem. And the engineering problems that follow do not look like
> classical AI, so we know that we have something interesting and new rather
> than rehashing an old concept with a fresh coat of paint. To the man on
> the
> street those two states look the same, but for someone in the trenches
> that
> looks like real progress for a change.
>
> That is the basis on which I am saying AI has been making real progress.
> Solving a problem that one cannot even describe in the theoretical
> abstract
> is nigh impossible, but engineering problems are something humans are
> reasonably good at brute-forcing in many cases. There are still legions of
> academics and clueless researchers following their One True Religion and
> living off grant mills that prefer minor variations of very old (and dead)
> ideas, but these people have never defined progress in the field and a lot
> of really good work is being done by multiple research groups on various
> aspects of core theory.
>
> The main thing to take away from this is that AI research is not nearly as
> stalled as a cursory examination of its history might suggest. For the
> first time in its history, it is starting to look interesting at something
> other than an academic level.
>

Tow other crucial factors:
a) We now have significant cheap computing power that is rapidly getting
cheaper. It's no longer a case of a megabuck per MIPS.
b) AI applications look feasible on near-term mass market machines. That is,
there is a lot of money to be made - it's not just academics messing about.

Dirk
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