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From: notes@pur-ee.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: The AI Challenge - (nf)
Message-ID: <1148@pur-ee.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 24-Nov-83 22:29:44 EST
Article-I.D.: pur-ee.1148
Posted: Thu Nov 24 22:29:44 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 26-Nov-83 06:44:33 EST
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Organization: Electrical Engineering Department , Purdue University
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#R:sri-arpa:-1384100:ecn-ee:15300001:000:2084
ecn-ee!davy    Nov 24 21:47:00 1983


As an aside to this discussion, I'm curious as to just what everyone
thinks of when they think of AI.

I am a student at Purdue, which has absolutely nothing in the way of 
courses on what *I* consider AI.  I have done a little bit of reading
on natural language processing, but other than that, I haven't had
much of anything in the way of instruction on this stuff, so maybe I'm
way off base here, but when I think of AI, I primarily think of:

	1) Natural Language Processing, first and foremost.  In
	   this, I include being able to "read" it and understand
	   it, along with being able to "speak" it.
	2) Computers "knowing" things - i.e., stuff along the
	   lines of the famous "blocks world", where the "computer"
	   has notions of pyramids, boxes, etc.
	3) Computers/programs which can pass the Turing test (I've
	   always thought that ELIZA sort of passes this test, at
	   least in the sense that lots of people actually think
	   the computer understood their problems).
	4) Learning programs, like the tic-tac-toe programs that
	   remember that "that" didn't work out, only on a much
	   more grandiose scale.
	5) Speech recognition and understanding (see #1).

For some reason, I don't think of pattern recognition (like analyzing
satellite data) as AI.  After all, it seems to me that this stuff is
mostly just "if <cond 1> it's trees, if <cond 2> it's a road, etc.",
which doesn't really seem like "intelligence".

What do you think of when I say "Artificial Intelligence"?  Note that 
I'm NOT asking for a definition of AI, I don't think there is one.  I
just want to know what you consider AI, and what you consider "other"
stuff.

Another question -- assuming the (very) hypothetical situation where 
computers and their programs could be made to be "infinitely" intelligent,
what is your "dream program" that you'd love to see written, even though
it realistically will probably never be possible?  Jokingly, I've always
said that my dream is to write a "compiler that does what I meant, not
what I said".

--Dave Curry
decvax!pur-ee!davy
eevax.davy@purdue