Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Introduction

The specialist field chosen for the interview is Artificial Intelligence (AI). The expert of AI interviewed for this paper is Patrick Henry Winston. He is a computer scientist in America. He is professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1992-1997 he was the director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He also found MIT Media Lab. He did thesis work with Marvin Minsky related to the difficulty in learning. His interests ate related to the human intelligence and machine language. Following is the interview conducted with him. The interview is related to the basic information of Artificial Intelligence, issues and problems, limitations and further progress in this field. The interview is presented in a question-answer format instead of a conversational format.

Firstly, an American computer scientist John McCarthy coined Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the science and engineering of creating intelligent machine. However, in the absence of an absolute definition of intelligence, only degrees of intelligence can be defined, with human intelligence being the benchmark to which other intelligences are compared. Whereas computers can carry out some tasks, they cannot carry out al, and they lack the crucial ability to reason. Computer programs may have tremendous amounts of speed and memory, but their abilities are circumscribed by the intellectual mechanisms that have been built into the programs. In fact, the ability to substitute large amounts of computing in lieu of understanding is what gives computers their ostensible “intelligence1.”

Question: What is Artificial Intelligence?

The best known definition of what artificial intelligence is proposed by M. Minsky, one of the leading researchers in the area. He claims it is the sciences of making machines do things that they were made by men require intelligence. This way of defining the AI ??has several drawbacks. First, the criteria for deciding if a machine is intelligent vary over time. Consider, for example, the activity of playing chess at a time could be regarded as characteristic of intelligent beings, today we have computers that are international masters in the sport and yet we refuse to accept that so be smart. On the other hand, if we go by this definition, our systems can do their work in different ways as does the human mind, so they do not help us much to understand it2.

A question arises about the identity of the AI ??is whether this is a science or art. According to some of the definitions we have given, we see that researchers in the field tend to identify with the first hypothesis. If the AI ??is not a science to justify itself, we can say then that is a technology that uses its techniques in developing real world applications. This has some implications, as there are no basic principles of AI shared by all systems; their evolution is governed by the parameters that indicate the market and, worse, that it is wrong to relate the principles of IA with those of the human mind.

If the AI ??is not a science but an art, how can we know ...