Re: [Sheflug] General Ramblings

[Alastair Donlon <nospam [at] netsoc.ucd.ie>]

On Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 02:53:14PM +0100, Will Newton wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Jun 2000, Alex Hudson wrote:
> 
> Game AI is a lot different to "real AI" though, so it's hard to actually
> be qualified in the field. Most of the stuff taught in universities seems
> aimed at "classical" problems like chess and travelling salesman.
> Which aren't much fun.

Not anymore. AI's changed a whole lot in the last 10 years. The chess problem
has, essentially, been solved and we can all see that it was a bad problem
now - it's too easy to just throw computing power at it rather than figure
out how good 'real' chess players play and imitate that.

AI research these days has moved away from the classical symbolic problems
to the 'real' problems - things like handwriting recognition, speech recognition
and robot control. Things like the travelling salesman problem, though, are
still _very_ relevant in the commercial world. All timetabling assistants
have to work out some non-optimal solution to it, and even the ones on the
market on the moment just use some simple heuristics - nowhere near the
power that could be provided by modern AI techniques.

A.D.

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