Revolutions in Artificial Intelligence and Me ;-)

I am not interested in "hard" things. I don't want other people to do "hard" things either. So, when I read about previous AI revolutions and learned about their "hard" problems, I was not inspired, to say the least.

1. Tough to do even a tic tac toe problem.
2. Tough to overcome "knowledge bottleneck".
3. Tough to encode "commonsense", as demonstrated by CYC project.
4. Machines will learn on their own, but you have to train them first, and it's Tough to train them.

But when Google fans claimed what it is doing is a sort of AI, I became inspired a bit because this brand of AI seems accessible and easier to do. Even then, I took no action actually.

Now, AI seems to have entered a new epoch. Some AI researchers claimed in a New Scientist article that they've done "with relatively little programming" what it had been tough for older kinds of AI. They labelled their kind of AI as "morphological computing." Here I explain one of their most illuminating examples.

1 snail is boring.
10 snails are still boring.

1 octopus is interesting.
10 octopuses are still more interesting.

Rich behaviours, idiosyncratic behaviours, responsive actions.

Are octopuses more "intelligent" than snails?
Are octopus brains more "intelligent" than those of snails?

The researcher knew that this can't be because he also knew that both of them are "mollusc." According to him, the octopus also has no brain.
Another useful link.

What excites me most is that an entity can be made to look, sound, seem, feel intelligent while in reality it has no real intelligence.(An aside: this is far better than Searle's Chinese Room interpreter.)

What inspires me most is that I don't need to design/code/program/write a brain to make my software behave intelligent.

That's, for a programmer, a bit too much even to dream about and wish for!

I share. Please use it for your benefits.

on January 27, 2012