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From: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: What actually is AI?
Message-ID: <1990Sep7.203744.4326@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 7 Sep 90 20:37:44 GMT
References: <90241.112651F0O@psuvm.psu.edu> <90243.142616F0O@psuvm.psu.edu> <6560@uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de> <2982@aipna.ed.ac.uk>
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Reply-To: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Organization: University of Rochester Computer Science Department
Lines: 62

In article <2982@aipna.ed.ac.uk>, cam@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
> In article <6560@uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de>
powers@uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de (David Powers AG Siekmann) writes:
> 
> >F0O@psuvm.psu.edu writes:
> 
> >>     In following the threads of my original posting, it seems that there
> >>is not one definition of what AI is.  However, what my original question
> >>was is, what is it that makes one program an AI one, and another one
non-AI?
> 
> As Brian Yamauchi has pointed out, it may well be rather silly expecting
> a *program* to display intelligence. 

Well... that's not exactly what I meant.  Although I was defining AI as
a research field, I *do* think it is possible for systems (autonomous
robots, for example) to display intelligence -- at least at the level of
very primitive animals (e.g. insects).

> But, as David Powers points out:
> 
> >the psychological perspective:
> >
> >	to build systems to do the things we ourselves can do to help
> >	us to understand our intelligence
> 
> In other words, AI is a label properly applied at the moment to research
> activity rather than artefacts (such as computer programs or robots) --
> because we currently can't make any (artificially) intelligent
> artefacts. So by this definition there is nothing in a *program* which
> makes it AI or not; what makes a program AI or not is whether it taught
> its author anything original and useful about the nature of
> intelligence.

I think this is a valid way to judge the usefulness of a research
program, but I also think it is reasonable to say that certain
"intelligent systems" do display certain limited forms of intelligence. 
Some display low-level animal-like intelligence (behavior-based robots,
etc.) while others display very narrow and very brittle slices of human
intelligence (expert systems, chess-playing programs, etc).

To answer the original poster's question: there is no clear definitions
to determine that program X is an "AI program" and program Y is not,
primarly because there is no clear definition of intelligence.  A better
way to look at the situation is that AI researchers are writing programs
which they hope will:

	(a) possess and display certain (limited) forms of intelligence
	(b) teach them something about the nature of human intelligence
	(c) show them how to build progressively more intelligent machines
	(d) have useful applications to tasks currently requiring intelligence
	(e) serve as an intermediate step toward the creation of truly
	    intelligent systems
	(f) help them get a major research grant
	(g) help them get tenure
	(h) all of the above

_______________________________________________________________________________

Brian Yamauchi				University of Rochester
yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu		Computer Science Department
_______________________________________________________________________________