Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!aplcen!haven!purdue!bu-cs!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aipna!cam
From: cam@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: An Alternative to Strong and Weak AI (was Re: STRONG AND WEAK AI)
Message-ID: <1734@aipna.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 8 Dec 89 17:52:16 GMT
References: <1698@aipna.ed.ac.uk> <11870@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <1989Dec3.185506.22039@cs.rochester.edu>
Reply-To: cam@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm)
Organization: Dept of AI, Edinburgh University, UK.
Lines: 61

In article <1989Dec3.185506.22039@cs.rochester.edu> yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) writes:
>In article <11870@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> harnad@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad) writes:
>>Chris Malcolm asked for a definition:

>> [defn of strong and weak AI omitted]

>>The typical error of believers in Strong AI is a misconstrual of
>>the Church-Turing Thesis: Whereas it may be true that every physical
>>process is "equivalent" to symbol manipulation, i.e., is simulable by
>>symbol manipulation, it is decidedly NOT true that every physical
>>process IS symbol manipulation. Flying, heating and transduction, for
>>example, are not. How does one fall into this error? By becoming lost
>>in the hermeneutic hall of mirrors created by the semantic
>>interpretations we cast onto symbol systems. We forget the difference
>>between what is merely INTERPRETABLE as X and what really IS X. We
>>confuse the medium with the message.

>I think this points out a need for a third class of AI research:
>research directed toward building intelligent systems which takes
>account of the need for an intelligent system to act in the real world
>-- not just think about acting in Blocks World.  For example: the
>work of Brooks and Moravec would fall into this category.

I agree. 

>This type of research seems to be emerging under a number of different
>names, in a number of different fields: behavior-based robotics,
>mobile robotics, reactive systems, artificial life, artificial
>creatures, cybernetics.

I agree. I'm delivering a paper at the IAS2 conference in Amsterdam next
week on just this topic: "A new emerging paradigm in robotics", but in
order not to excite too much controversy I don't mention the last few
categories :-)

>I think the term Artificial Creatures, coined by Rodney Brooks, is the
>most descriptive.  Traditional AI deals with high-level cognitive
>abilities, Artificial Life deals with abstract populations of
>extremely simple organisms, Artificial Creatures deals with building
>autonomous organisms which are of intermediate complexity between
>amoebas and logicians.

If you build artificial creatures like Brooks. Because my game is
assembly robotics, a task with a logical complexity which (IMHO) is
beyond smart reactive local decisions, but involves some kind of
foresight or planning, my artificial creatures are assembly robots which
have to plan and then execute an assembly task in the real world. This
involves a hybrid architecture, where a classical ideal-world planner
plans in terms which are derived from the behavioural capabilities of a
behaviour-based assembly agent. The assembly agent is designed with a
similar philosophy to that of Brooks, but since it is designed not only
to succeed in its tasks, but to present a suitable virtual world to the
planner, there is an extra constraint on the task modularisation. That
constraint is sometimes referred to as the symbol grounding problem.

As you have recognised, this kind of research doesn't fit the Procrustean
strong/weak AI dichotomy. Hence my interest in new terms.
-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.aipna   031 667 1011 x2550
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK