From: hibou00000nospam@enterprise.net
Ashlie Benjamin Hocking wrote:
>
> "Allan Bruce" writes:
>
> > Hi there,
> >
> > I made an appointment to see one of my lecturers a few days back and said
it
> > was going to be about AI. When I got there, I aske dhim about Neural Nets
> > and he told me that NNs are not considered a branch of AI.
> > I didnt want to disagree but he did not explain why. Could someone please
> > elaborate and explain why NNs are not considered a bramch of AI?
> >
> > Thanks
> > Allan
> >
>
> NNs are indeed a branch of AI. This is not only my opinion, but
> evidently also that of Russell & Norvig since they devote a section in
> their book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" to it. There
> are some (older people especially) who think that NNs are not part of
> AI, because they think NNs are trivial. This is largely due, IMO, to
> the work of Minsky & Papert (in their book Perceptrons).
Concepts as complex as AI are fairly fuzzy and there's room for
disagreement about definitions.
For me, it's nothing to do with age, and nothing to do with
the capabilities of Rosenblatt's perceptrons, and everything to
do with how ANNs work. Many of the ANN algorithms have counterparts
in statistics (e.g. non-linear regression, clustering algorithms).
Would you consider a program which embodies those techniques, written
in say SAS, to be AI?
> Since that
> time, their have been numerous developments in the field - although
> even then they were only trivial if you limited yourself to analyzing
> networks that were easily analyzed (i.e, the trivial
> ones).
No one's denying there's been considerable progress since Perceptrons
was written.
> Ironically, when all is said and done, NNs may end up being the
> only enduring part of AI (although I'm sure to get some howls here),
> due to the perception, as Parnas wrote, that AI are those problems
> that we don't know how to solve. Therefore, once we understand those
> problems, they cease to be AI. (This is meant to be flippant, but yet
> it still explains how things such as playing chess and speech
> recognition are more and more NOT considered to be AI, although this
> depends on who is doing the considering.)
The successful chess programs largely use brute-force look-ahead and
memorization of textbook openings. While good chess players do indeed
use look-ahead and memorization, they also use much more complex
reasoning which is /not/ modelled in those chess programs. The chess
programs which /do/ model this don't yet play at grandmaster level.
Parnas's point is often made and is I think may be based on a
misunderstanding of the history of AI. Long ago, it /was/
thought that people reasoned using search and logic, and back
then programs such as General Problem Solver were considered AI;
later they realized that people needed vast amounts of knowledge,
and programs such as Mycin were considered AI but no longer GPS;
later yet they realized that people used common sense and how to
do /that/ became the hottest topic in AI. A program like GPS
was AI at the time, because back then it attempted to model
human reasoning; but now that we know that people don't reason
in that way, such a program would no longer be considered AI.
--
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