Re: [Sheflug] General Ramblings

[Alex Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Fri, 9 Jun 2000, Alastair Donlon wrote:

> Not anymore. AI's changed a whole lot in the last 10 years. The chess problem
> has, essentially, been solved 

'Chess' certainly hasn't been solved!! Indeed, the theory that chess is
even *soluable* hasn't been answered.. are you talking more about Deep
Blue, etc.? That effort was about beating Grandmasters, nothing to do with
solving chess.

> 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.

That's neural networks.. not something I class as AI, although obviously
people will argue. Most people don't have a strict definition of AI, but I
don't include weighted networks, neural networks, heuristics, etc.

> 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.

That's even more non-AI ;)) Stochastics & other (essentially) random
techniques are just about cutting down the search space in some hopeful
manner, there's not all that much intelligence applied to the situation.

Maybe it's just me, but I count AI as stuff to do with robots & life
programs, little else. None of the stuff above counts (IMHO, of course).
Worse, I've seen papers that try to show Quantum computing to be some
subset of AI by attempting to apply q-computation to 1-sat, k-sat, etc., 
problems - seems AI has a very broad definition now. Anything that
involves NP-hard, complete or other such computationally hard stuff
(constraint logic), and doesn't have fluffy animals & sweets (life,
pokemon, etc.) doesn't cut it ;)))

Cheers,

Alex.


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