Artifical Intelligence

[yrwyddfa]

I think that self-awareness is not core to the creation of artificial life, but perhaps an important factor to artificial intelligence.

The first step is artificial life. Complexity should emerge from this that might lead to intelligence, and self-awareness all by it's self without a single helping of human kindness

[Shaggy Hiker]

I think that we are now firmly in the realm of wild speculation.

Oh, like we ALWAYS stay in the realm of the known and practical here

[capsulecorpjx]

I would think artificial life is harder to do than aritificial intelligence.

Viable Life requires:
1) The ability to acquire food (or for AL, energy)
2) The ability to reproduce.
3) The ability to have random changes over time in order to evolve new features, allowing an artificial species to adapt to changes in the environment or take advantage of a new niche in the environment.

Artificial intelligence would be viable to duplicate, if we can ever understand how our own brains and conciousness work.

Lastly Aritifical life will not necessarily produce artificial intelligence. Since life does not have to necessarily produce intelligence (meaning complex language and reasoning skills). It took life billions of years to produce higher level primates like us. For all we know it could have been a freak accident.

I think that self-awareness is not core to the creation of artificial life, but perhaps an important factor to artificial intelligence.

The first step is artificial life. Complexity should emerge from this that might lead to intelligence, and self-awareness all by it's self without a single helping of human kindness

[Shaggy Hiker]

I agree, artificial life is a FAR harder problem.

I don't think we need to understand our own consciousness, however. I firmly believe that if we put a sufficiently powerful learning engine into a stimulating environment, intelligence might be able to create itself.

[Valleysboy1978]

Viable Life requires:
1) The ability to acquire food (or for AL, energy)
2) The ability to reproduce.
3) The ability to have random changes over time in order to evolve new features, allowing an artificial species to adapt to changes in the environment or take advantage of a new niche in the environment.

A manufacturing robot can be programmed to produce duplicates of itself, would this not constitute as reproduction? As for gathering energy well that is easy enough, with the abundance of electricity around.

Random changes, in other words "Ghosts in the Machine". This is entirely dependant on AI because AI would be able to learn and evolve, so it seems AL is a consequence of AI.

[yrwyddfa]

Artificial life does not need to be physical it can also be virtual, and in this respect we, as the human race, are remarkably close.

But as all with all new revolutions, we're nearly there, in a decade it'll be widespread.

[Valleysboy1978]

Good point, I suppose it's easier to think of AL in the physical world. I'd imagine the virtual AL will be first as it would be easier to build

[yrwyddfa]

Our environment is the physical natural world. I do not think it is inconceivable that an artificial life could exist in an artificial environment - especially if it was under the direct control of mankind. After all we too can be as gods.

As for self-aware robots running around killing people; it's a little unlikely at the moment, in my opinion - but possible, I guess.

[Foxer]

Sample case: Your driving down the road at a fast clip and another vehicle pulls into traffic right in front of you.

1) Jump out of your car.
2) Hit the brakes.
3) Steer left and right.
4) Scream 'Oh hell' and crash straight into the car.

The difficulty I have is that there may be a 5th and 6th option available (Do Nothing & oh ... suck a lollypop) and in fact, an infinite number of actions available that are impossible to model. You can present 4 options to a program and it can learn the best option based on outcomes that have been weighted but in reality, there may be more actions available than can't be modelled.

A chess program has a finite number of squares on a board with a finite number of pieces. The state of play at any one time dictates a finite number of moves available with a finite number of outcomes. Each move and outcome has been weighted by some developer so the program can decide on a rational action.

To me - real AI would be the program realising that it is about to lose the game no matter what move it makes and so instead opting for an action outside it's programing, ie - deciding to knock the board to the ground and scattering the pieces to the floor.

A bad sport - no doubt - but a clear demonstration it is not following any human built laws or borders.

[yrwyddfa]

Example 3: Chess.

We've seen in the news recently a match between the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, and a very fast chess computer, Deep Blue. The computer lost the match, but won one game and tied others.

What is involved in chess programming? Essentially the sequences of possible moves form a tree: The first player has a choice of 20 different moves (most of which are not very good), after each of which the second player has a choice of many responses, and so on. Chess playing programs work by traversing this tree finding what the possible consequences would be of each different move.

The tree of moves is not very deep -- a typical chess game might last 40 moves, and it is rare for one to reach 200 moves. Since each move involves a step by each player, there are at most 400 positions involved in most games. If we traversed the tree of chess positions only to that depth, we would only need enough memory to store the 400 positions on a single path at a time. This much memory is easily available on the smallest computers you are likely to use.

So perfect chess playing is a problem in PSPACE. (Actually one must be more careful in definitions. There is only a finite number of positions in chess, so in principle you could write down the solution in constant time. But that constant would be very large. Generalized versions of chess on larger boards are in PSPACE.)

The reason this deep game-tree search method can't be used in practice is that the tree of moves is very bushy, so that even though it is not deep it has an enormous number of vertices. We won't run out of space if we try to traverse it, but we will run out of time before we get even a small fraction of the way through. Some pruning methods, notably "alpha-beta search" can help reduce the portion of the tree that needs to be examined, but not enough to solve this difficulty. For this reason, actual chess programs instead only search a much smaller depth (such as up to 7 moves), at which point they don't have enough information to evaluate the true consequences of the moves and are forced to guess by using heuristic "evaluation functions" that measure simple quantities such as the total number of pieces left.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/161/960312.html

'Forced to guess' not being consistent with rational thought.

[kaihirst]

no life is artificial nor intelligence either; just becasue the intelligence is created by a being doesnt mean that it is simply "finite", as you are bounding yourself to the realms of finite thinking.

is it artificial if the intelligence is self aware, then beats the opponent such as a master chess player on a cumputer, but because the intelligence is on a machine it is artificial? i dont think so..

Kai

[honeybee]

Artificial Intelligence

We haven’t had a thread, well not for some time anyway, that was devoted completely to the subject of AI, yet it still rears it’s head from time to time in the context of other arguments.

So I thought I’d start one.

...

What do you guys think?

I couldn't resist it! Don't you think Bush has surpassed all other efforts in this field? Creating Artificial Intelligence for everything he has done including the first election win?

Coming back to the topic of artificial intelligence, does someone think of its adversities? What would really happen if we were to create robots who can act like humans, when the humans are busy becoming robots?

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[Valleysboy1978]

...robots who can act like humans, when the humans are busy becoming robots

A good quote there honeybee

[sevenhalo]

I don't really have anything to add that hasn't already been said to some degree, but I'll plug a couple books I've read that pertain to this:

The Age of Intelligent Mahchines Written in 1990
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence Written in 2000
Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology Came out a month ago

[Shaggy Hiker]

A good quote there honeybee

Amen.

[honeybee]

A good quote there honeybee

Thanks.

I really wonder if all this technology, seeking more and more advancements in virtually every field is finally going to bring anything good to the human race, in terms of long term gains. The more we are trying to uncover secrets, the more I think we are heading towards that edge from where we shall take off into an abyss.

I learnt in my textbooks that the invention of the wheel revolutionized the human life. I wonder if that's the culprit for everything. Surely the cavemen were more at peace with themselves and their surroundings than us.

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[Valleysboy1978]

Technology is the only reason mankind has become dominant. Perhaps it would be better to rethink how technology is used. Rather than using technology to make life easier, we should instead use technology to supplement, to increase our understanding.

AI or indeed AL is tough to call. It's obvious to see that is where things are going but so little of the scientists attention has been diverted from the question us programmers have concluded "It is not whether CAN we do it, but SHOULD we?"

[honeybee]

Technology is the only reason mankind has become dominant. Perhaps it would be better to rethink how technology is used. Rather than using technology to make life easier, we should instead use technology to supplement, to increase our understanding.

AI or indeed AL is tough to call. It's obvious to see that is where things are going but so little of the scientists attention has been diverted from the question us programmers have concluded "It is not whether CAN we do it, but SHOULD we?"

All that's fine, but when you say technology should be put to good use, you start another war because everybody claims that their ideas of what is good use and what is bad use must prevail over others. Don't you think all modern wars and conflicts boil down to simply that, one person's view being forced upon another's? At least in the good old days they had clear cut objectives to win in the war, like Helen of Troy... Ah I love the old days

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[Valleysboy1978]

Nothing about war is clear cut, besides it is usually forcing their beliefs on others that starts wars (whether it be religious, governmental etc)
Think about the car, when has the development of the car actually caused a war? Or flight? These never caused a war, sure they were developed BECAUSE of war, but were never the reason for it.

Space travel is an area of technology relatively new yet no wars have been caused by it. Technology can benefit all mankind if it is used properly and responsibly...unlike nuclear weaponry

[honeybee]

Nothing about war is clear cut, besides it is usually forcing their beliefs on others that starts wars (whether it be religious, governmental etc)
Think about the car, when has the development of the car actually caused a war? Or flight? These never caused a war, sure they were developed BECAUSE of war, but were never the reason for it.

Space travel is an area of technology relatively new yet no wars have been caused by it. Technology can benefit all mankind if it is used properly and responsibly...unlike nuclear weaponry

Don't forget it was the space travel that became a point of contention during the cold war.

If you think about the car, it needs fuel. And then countries would try and control the production and supply of fuel. See how much power the OPEC countries wield. It's the major reason why the US has been greedy about the Middle East.

I have come to think of almost everything has two uses, one good and the other bad. And the definition of good and bad often becomes subjective, so it changes from person to person. Countries are now talking about global warming and containing the effects of pollution and therefore containing the demand for fossil fuel and search for cleaner fuel. But when the fast developing economies of China and India want a greater share of the global fuel consumption, there's really no sound argument to stop them from doing that. The US and other European countries have been doing it for years without anyone checking them (and the US still does, while the others have at least recognized the need). So while some countries will say dependence on fossil fuel is bad, some countries will tend to disagree.

Think about multi-culturalism. Is it good or is it bad? Till recent times, people tended to agree that it's good. Look at America, Briton and France now. There are people in these countries who may be feeling otherwise. So how do you decide what's good and what's bad? There's no absolute good or absolute bad, probably. What's good for someone may be bad for someone else.

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