I figure while we're assigning arbitrary definitions to an apparently ill defined concept, why not take the simplest?
Except that saying that "AI is search" is like saying that a house is a hammer. Search is a tool that can be used to create the end result (along with other tools, skill and creativity), but that doesn't magically transform it into the final product.
...and having said that we must accept that a 'so-called AI' that uses only search to solve a problem is not 'AI', but rather just an intelligently designed implementation of a solution to a computational problem.
This is the most common objection raised about AI: that it's just intelligent design, rather than an embodiment of intelligence... but then, are we any more (and here I state that I believe in 'design by evolution' rather than 'design by God', just to make my position unequivocally clear). So where do we draw the line?
Can't they both be true?How come we exist?Due to what?Something or someone is accountable for that Let's call Him God.
I submit that "Artificial Intelligence" is just the name for an academic field. It is a social label first and foremost, used by researchers to classify themselves and others.
Like those from all academic fields, its practitioners are dependent on grant money to survive, and judged by the number of papers they write that are accepted for publication by major journals. Those are the inputs and outputs of the academic game.
Success in the game comes partly from having good ideas, and it comes partly from having the technical expertise to execute them well. But it also depends strongly on marketing, self-promotion; you have to convince others -- article reviewers at journals, funding agencies, and sometimes even the general public -- that your ideas are better, cooler, more interesting.
And what better way to do that then by calling them "Artificial Intelligence?"
An example: What really is machine learning? There is some system which, given inputs, produces outputs; we want to select inputs which minimize some cost function defined over the outputs. That is all. Another group of academics does pretty much the same thing (using more abstract language), and they call what they do "Optimal Control."
Question: Who is more likely to get the newspaper article written about them with the sexy headline, "Smart Computers 'Learn' like Babies:" 1 - the researcher who calls what they do "Machine Learning" and talks about the computer being "intelligent," OR 2 - the researcher who calls what they do "Optimal Control" and talks about minimizing objective functions?
Answer: #1.
This is just one example of a general trend. You succeed in academia by making what you do sound sexy -- and calling what you do "Artificial Intelligence" achieves that.
If it sounds like I'm bashing Artificial Intelligence researchers, I'm not: It's the game that all academics play. And if it sounds like I'm more generally bashing academics, again, I'm not: Much of industry, politics, and essentially every other human endeavor is built on a strong foundation of bullshit.
I'm just pointing it out in this case, because I'd hate for everybody to waste their time philosophizing about what is essentially a brand name.
I figure while we're assigning arbitrary definitions to an apparently ill defined concept, why not take the simplest?
Except that saying that "AI is search" is like saying that a house is a hammer. Search is a tool that can be used to create the end result (along with other tools, skill and creativity), but that doesn't magically transform it into the final product.
Except isn't that like saying an encyclopedia is intelligence? (This is like a game of telephone, isn't it? :) ). I would be more inclined to say it's the producing of the solution that is intelligence, not the solution itself. I'm not exactly going to defend this "AI is search" idea to the death (it's not even originally my idea), so maybe there are other tools that can't be classified as search, but I would consider skill and creativity to be more attributes of intelligence.
Quote:
...and having said that we must accept that a 'so-called AI' that uses only search to solve a problem is not 'AI', but rather just an intelligently designed implementation of a solution to a computational problem.
Perhaps our definition of search is different as well. As you said, one does not need to know how to do something for AI techniques to work, and sometimes not even the end goal. Wouldn't that require some form of search? Wouldn't even the wiring and re-wiring of our brain be a form of search? I don't know.
Also, I don't necessarily believe that AI is a misnomer, rather I think people tend to have these Johnny 5 expectations of what it is or should be.
Ahh, the definition groweth! Currently "Is an autonomous creature AND organizes information".
Consider a program which, given a poem as input, determines how interesting it is, and then composes a witty retort to the poem using the same metric and rhyming structure. Since it isn't an autonomous creature, is it not AI?
For AI we dont need to imagine much, there are plenty of game AIs that behave pretty intelligently. And we could say that they *are* intelligent to some degree.
But if there was a scale to measure inteligence on how qualitatively and cuantitatively a being (artificial or not) organizes data, then bubble sort, your program and all the games AI's would be near ZERO and humans would be at the top.
