Yesterday, I finally sobered up and decided to do some serious reading. So with “Artificial Intelligence – A modern approach“, “Knowledge Management Tools: resources for the economy” on the side and Rachel on my lap, I opened the Wikipedia page for Artificial Intelligence. This is a neatly written page (though one might disagree on certain aspects). Here are two interesting things that I found…
In the section “Knowledge Representation“, the article talks about the qualification problem: “Many of the things people know take the form of “working assumptions.” For example, if a bird comes up in conversation, people typically picture an animal that is fist sized, sings, and flies. None of these things are true about birds in general. John McCarthy identified this problem in 1969 as the qualification problem: for any commonsense rule that AI researchers care to represent, there tend to be a huge number of exceptions. Almost nothing is simply true or false in the way that abstract logic requires.”
From the blog, “No sides. Only questions.”: “These premises are not absolute. They throw open a huge number of other questions. Other problems include definitions.” “These questions again lead to the same conclusion: Human understanding is flawed. It is a quasi-stable set of premises judged on another quasi-stable set of premises.”
The field of AI now takes defines intelligence in terms of rational agents. In the section “Intelligent Agent Paradigm“, the Wikipedia article says, “When the economist’s definition of a rational agent was married to computer science’s definition of an object or module, the intelligent agent paradigm was complete. An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success. The simplest intelligent agents are programs that solve specific problems. The most complicated intelligent agents would be rational, thinking human beings.”
I think the definition is in sync with the recent attempt to understand economics and capitalism, “The Case of Too Many Eggs“: “So, what all the people in the world are trying to do is to find innovative ways to put others out of work. From the barter system to high funda stuff like sub-prime mortgages, newer and newer ways to put others out of work are being formed.”
We, as humans, have been trying to answer the same questions! Does it also mean that if everyone had unlimited time in the word, we would come up with every conceivable knowledge? And I am reminded of the quote from Newton, “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.” The giants are too tall now-a-days!!
PS: Rachel is my girlfriend – a Dell XPS M1530.
