perm filename NILSON[1,BGB] blob
sn#078580 filedate 1974-02-14 generic text, type T, neo UTF8
The remainder of this section is a rather ecclesiastical
discussion concerning the relation of computer vision and artificial
intelligence; the lay reader will not miss anything important by
skipping on to the next section.
A favorite pastime of technology aficionados consists of
defining the term "artificial intelligence". The founders Minsky and
McCarthy coined the phrase; critics such as Lighthill and Dreyfus
attack it; advocates Nilsson and Fiegenbaum defend it; and
futurologists such as Herman Kahn, use the term in sentences such as
"True artificial intelligence will not appear until around 2020";
which would seem to leave us, twentieth century people, with
artificial artificial intelligence.
General vision, as oppose to visual puzzles, is not an
Artificial Intelligence problem in the sense that it does not involve
verbal abstraction, symbolism, theorem proving, game playing,
planning, heuristic programming or self programming. In fact, I
feel that computer vision, like list processing and symbolic
integration will drop out of Artificial Intelligence.
"The history of progress in the development of systems for automatic
symbolic integration poses an interesting question about the
definition of artificial intelligence. Few would argue that Slagle's
SAINT program was a product of artificial intelligence research.
Moses' SIN program for symbolic integration seldom needed to resort
to search, and for this reason some people consider it much more
powerful (intelligent ?) than SAINT. Now, Risch (1969) has developed
an algorithm for integrating many types of expressions. Risch
considers himself a mathematician, not an artificial intelligence
researcher. In your opinion should Risch's algorithm be considered
part of the subject matter of artificial intelligence ? If you would
exclude Risch from artifial intelligence, how would you respond to
the statement that every artificial intelligence program might
eventually be dominated by a (more intelligent?) non artificial
intelligence algorithm? If you would include Risch, would you also
include the long-division algorithm?"
- Nils J. Nilsson, problem 4-5;
Problem-Solving Methods in Artificial Intelligence.
In answer to Nilsson's problem, I would exclude Risch from
Artificial Intelligence and cheerfully look forward to the remote
day when all A.I. problems are superceded by specific programming
techniques.