AI [ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE] IN INDIA -

rahul_parab2006 · Sep 22, 2006

AI - THE BEGINNING
On March 24, 2005, an announcement was made in newspapers across the country, from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, that a company had been founded to apply neuroscience research to achieve human-level artificial intelligence. The reason the press release was so widely picked up is that the man behind it was Jeff Hawkins, the brilliant inventor of the PalmPilot, an invention that made him both wealthy and respected.

You’d think from the news reports that the idea of approaching the pursuit of artificial human-level intelligence by modeling the brain was a novel one. Actually, a Web search for “computational neuroscience” finds over a hundred thousand webpages and several major research centers. At least two journals are devoted to the subject. Over 6,000 papers are available online. Amazon lists more than 50 books about it. A Web search for “human brain project” finds more than eighteen thousand matches.Many researchers think of modeling the human brain or creating a “virtual” brain a feasible project, even if a “grand challenge.” In other words, the idea isn’t a new one. . .

The fact is, we have no unifying theory of neuroscience. We don’t know what to build, much less how to build it.As one observer put it, neuroscience appears to be making “antiprogress” — the more information we acquire, the less we seem to know.

A Brief History of A.I.
Duplicating or mimicking human-level intelligence is an old notion — perhaps as old as humanity itself. In the 19th century, as Charles Babbage conceived of ways to mechanize calculation, people started thinking it was possible — or arguing that it wasn’t. Toward the middle of the 20th century, as mathematical geniuses Claude Shannon,Norbert Wiener,John von Neumann,Alan Turing, and others laid the foundations of the theory of computing, the necessary tool seemed available.

In 1955, a research project on artificial intelligence was proposed; a conference the following summer is considered the official inauguration of the field. The proposal is fascinating for its assertions, assumptions, hubris, and naïveté, all of which have characterized the field of A.I. ever since. The authors proposed that ten people could make significant progress in the field in two months. That ten-person, two-month project is still going strong — 50 years later. And it’s involved the efforts of more like tens of thousands of people.

rahul_parab2006 · Sep 22, 2006

A.I. IN ARTIFICIAL LIFE
In 2000, several prominent artificial life researchers published their co-authored list of 14 “open problems in artificial life”. Of special interest is their open problem number 11: “Demonstrate the emergence of intelligence and mind in an artificial living system. ” Not only do the authors pose the problem, but they give what strikes me as excellent advice towards its solution:

“To make progress, one must have a method to detect intelligence and mind when they are present in a system. Consciousness is the most difficult aspect of mind to detect, and initial progress is certain to be somewhere else. A more tractable aspect of mind to detect is meaning, that is, internal states that have semantic or representational significance for the entity and that influence the entity’s behavior by means of their semantic content.”

Progress along these recommended lines toward the solution of problem 11 will also involve work of relevance to what they identify as open problem number 10: “Develop a theory of information processing, information flow, and information generation for evolving systems.” Among their remarks on information, one in particular strikes me as especially significant:

“Firstly, there appear to be two complementary kinds of information transmission in living systems. One is the conservative hereditary transmission of information through evolutionary time. The other is transmission of information specified in a system’s physical environment to components of the system, possibly mediated by the components themselves, with the concomitant possibility of a combination of information processing and transmission. The latter is clearly also linked with the generation of information (to be discussed last). Clarifying the range of possibilities for information transmission, and determining which of those possibilities the biosphere exploits, is a fundamental enquiry of artificial life.

As I read the quoted passage, the first kind of information transmission is that which passes from parent to offspring in virtue of reproduction. This is information transmission that traverses generations. The second kind of information transmission is from the environment to the organism. This is something that can happen over multiple generations as populations adapt and evolve. But the transmission of information from environment to organism can also take place within the lifetime of a single organism and this is especially evident in creatures capable of sensory perception and memory. Both perception and memory are amenable to information-theoretic analyses: perception involves the transmission of a signal across space and memory involves the transmission of a signal across time.

The search for mind will be guided by the search for entities that have states with “semantic or representational significance”. The earliest instances of such states will be ones that constitute the pick-up by organisms of information about their environments via sensory components. Slightly more sophisticated instances will involve the retention and processing of that information over time via mechanisms of memory and computation. These forms of information transmission and processing—the ones that constitute the earliest instances of cognition—will emerge in the course of the evolution of organisms that are not themselves in possession of anything cognitive, but may nonetheless be understood in informational terms as follows. The pre-cognitive forbears of cognizes, the non-cognitive mere organism from which cognitive organisms evolve, can be characterized in terms of the transmission of information from parents to offspring via inheritance and the acquisition of novel information at the species level. Non-cognitive or “mere” organisms are not capable of the acquisition of information except by inheritance: novel information is acquired only at the species level over evolutionary time. In contrast, cognitive organisms are the ones capable of the acquisition of novel information in their own lifetime.

These remarks help to suggest a method for addressing open problem number 11: develop a method for evolving artificial organisms in ways such that we (1) are able to detect which of the various kinds of information transmission are present in the system and (2) manipulate factors such as environments and fitness functions to encourage the evolution of the modes of information transmission distinctive of cognitive activity.

AI [ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE] IN INDIA -

rahul_parab2006

Rahul Parab

rahul_parab2006

Rahul Parab