Re: Re: Artificial Intelligence Programming in Perl

[theorbtwo]

I don't think so. Perhaps we've got a problem of vocaublary here. AI is dead. ML (Machine Learning) is making a comeback, from my point of view at least. There is great work being done on the classification problem. I can't tell you much about how that work is being done (both because I may or may not be under NDA (my internal legal magic 8 ball says situation cloudy) and because I don't know). But I can tell you that it's damm impressive at doing things like classifying web pages, and picking out name/title pairs.

As far as I'm concerned, AI=ML. Researchers who worked there (including, I'm told, and belive, some of the best AI researchers in the world) agreed, and said that the primary reason for the name change is that AI scares people.

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We are using here a powerful strategy of synthesis: wishful thinking. -- The Wizard Book

[frag]

Very well-put, but I'd say that there is a slight difference between AI and ML, if just in scope: AI says "we want to make a program that thinks, and we can do it relatively soon", and ML says "there's this particular statistical classicification problem that we're trying to solve". ML may eventually lead to AI, but there's plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the few who advocate good ol'fashioned strong AI. (I'm aiming that towards Cyc/OpenCyc, Mindpixel, and Moravec, although I've lost track of what he's doing these days. The Cog project seems less grandiose and cocky to judge from their statements.) But beyond all of that, different branches of ML, and also human cognitive modelling, are active, and chipping away at their own domain-specific problems.

-- Frag.
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