Olie, I agree with most of your statements, however, history shows that almost every subfield of AI has enjoyed a rapid progress period accompanied by optimism, then followed by a long period of slow moving accompanied by pessimism. Just think about expert system in the early 1980s and neural network in the late 1980s, or, more recently, the rise of "multi-agent system" and "data mining" movements. Even NLP looked promising to some people when statistical methods began to show their power. Because of this, I'm not sure how long robotics can keep its recent improving rate without major progress in AI in general.
I wonder if there is anyone in this list who has been actually working in the field of robotics, and I would be very interested in learning the causes of the recent development. Pei On 10/19/06, Olie Lamb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
(Excellent list there, Matt) Although Pei Wang makes a good point that the fragmentation of AI does make it difficult to compare projects, it is interesting+ to note the huge differences in the movements in different narrow-AI fields. As has already been mentioned, it is interesting+ to compare the way that progress is very slow in areas such as NLP and Expert Systems, whereas there is significant, albeit gradual progress in physical interaction systems. For instance, the soccer-bots get better every year, cars can now finish DARPA grand challenge -like events in reasonable time... (I personally think that we're fast approaching a critical point where the technology is just good enough to attract more cash and hence more improvement; although meatbags will be better traffic-drivers for a while yet, physical interaction systems can now perform well enough for many applications) Although the question "What is State-of-the-Art?" won't attract an incontrivertibly good answer, it prompts a lot of bloody good questions that can be answered usefully. -- Olie ________________________________ This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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