XPost: comp.ai.alife, comp.ai.games   
   From: bear@sonic.net   
      
   wtkiii@hotmail.com wrote:   
   >     Since people don't really understand how the mind works,   
   > programming an AI is difficult and the past half century or so of   
   > research has been unsuccessful.   For games though, there might be   
   > little tricks for making the character appear intelligent.  I would   
   > think along those lines and not waste time on AI for game characters.   
      
   I don't think I agree that it's been "unsuccessful." We've learned a   
   lot.   
      
   We have better search techniques, better algorithms for machine   
   vision, better methods of spatial representation, and scads and   
   scads of useful and workable heuristics for finding "good"   
   solutions to intractable problems - even if they're not necessarily   
   the "best" solutions.   
      
   We've learned a lot about language and parsing, a lot about efficient   
   methods of doing mathematical regressions, about the mathematical   
   properties of intractable problems, etc.   
      
   We've been able to make a lot of successful applications, too: from   
   chess and poker playing games to useful (though limited) natural-   
   language interfaces and systems for searching vast amounts of   
   NL text for writing about particular subjects, to expert systems   
   that have proven incredibly useful especially in industrial   
   control applications.  None of them is as smart as a person, nor   
   smart in exactly the same *way* as a person, but they can do things   
   that we need done, so they're useful.   
      
   Various people have held forth goals and achieved them.  Various   
   others have contented themselves with pointing at the goals that   
   no one has achieved yet.  Every time something becomes an acceptable   
   engineering technique, we quit calling it "AI".  But that doesn't   
   change the fact that a lot of successful engineering techniques   
   come from AI research.   
      
   And people are still making new discoveries....   
      
   					Bear   
      
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