AI and cognitive psychology rant (was Re: BIG successes of Lisp...)

[Stephen Horne]

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 07:45:40 GMT, Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it>
wrote:

>Stephen Horne wrote:
>   ...
>> I remember the context where I first encountered Bayes theorem. It was
>> in AI - expert systems, to be precise - along with my first encounter
>
>OK, but Reverend Bayes developed it well before "AI" was even conceived,
>around the middle 18th century; considering Bayes' theorem to be part
>of AI makes just about as much sense as considering addition in the
>same light, if "expert systems" had been the first context in which
>you had ever seen numbers being summed.

OK, but you can't say that a system isn't artificial intelligence just
because it uses Bayes theorem or any other method either - it isn't
about who first described the formula or algorithm or whatever.

>I recall T-shirts boldly emblazoned
>with "P(A|B) = P(B|A) P(A) / P(B)" worn at computational linguistics
>conferences as a deliberately inflammatory gesture, too:-).

;-)

>> Funny how a current popular application of this approach (spam
>> filtering) is not considered to be an expert system, or even to be AI
>> at all. But AI was never meant to be in your face. Software acts more
>
>I don't see how using Bayes' Theorem, or any other fundamental tool
>of probability and statistics, connects a program to "AI", any more
>than using fundamental techniques of arithmetic or geometry would.

Well, I don't see how a neural net can be considered intelligent
whether trained using back propogation, forward propogation or a
genetic algorithm. Or a search algorithm, whether breadth first, depth
first, prioritised, using heuristics, or applying backtracking I don't
care. Or any of the usual parsing algorithms that get applied in
natural language and linguistics (Early etc). I know how all of these
work so therefore they cannot be considered intelligent ;-)

Certainly the trivial rule-based expert systems consisting of a huge
list of if statements are, IMO, about as unintelligent as you can get.

It's a matter of the problem it is trying to solve rather than simply
saying 'algorithm x is intelligent, algorithm y is not'. An
intelligent, knowledge-based judgement of whether an e-mail is or is
not spam is to me the work of an expert system. The problem being that
once people know how it is done, they stop thinking of it as
intelligent.

Perhaps AI should be defined as 'any means of solving a problem which
the observer does not understand' ;-)

Actually, I remember an article once with the tongue-in-cheek claim
that 'artificial stupidity' and IIRC 'artificial bloody mindedness'
would be the natural successors to AI. And that paperclip thing in
Word did not exist until about 10 years later!


-- 
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk