Pei: What type of reasoning is needed for AI? The major answers are:
(A): deduction only, (B) multiple types, including deduction, induction, abduction, analogy, etc.
And the other thing that AI presumably lacks currently - this sounds so obvious as to be almost silly to say, but I can't remember it being discussed - is imaginative reasoning by way of *observation.* If you can't perceive the world, other than to a v. limited extent, (as we all agree, pace Wozniak's robot), you can hardly observe it - and look for clues/evidence and so learn about not just murders, (the obvious association), but all forms of behaviour of all things and organisms. I must admit I've never thought about this, and I'm groping for an analogy of how huge a void this entails - it's as if you could only travel the world locked in a rail carriage on a few well-established rail lines, and never walk or otherwise move around anywhere - and had to rely entirely on second-hand books etc for your knowledge - in which case, you might well think that logic was a significant form of reasoning. If you can't observe the world, you are so-o-o buggered...
Now a funny thing. I Google and there are loads of "AI" - "observe the world" associations. Indeed who is numero uno (well duo) in many thousands:
*Why has no one yet managed to build a thinking machine? Mainly it's because no one has really tried to build a whole mind: a computer system that could observe the world around it, act in it.." Ben - The Path to Posthumanity. (I'm beginning to think the Net is just footnotes to Ben's voluminous publications).
So I check out some more - and now I think I understand what's going on here. {Please correct me].
Everyone is talking about observation as if it is PASSIVE - as if you just record the world and THEN you start reasoning.
But it's not - just as perception is heavily enactive, (with you choosing what to look at), so we engage in OBSERVATION-AS-REASONING - looking for clues. And that is arguably the most fundamental arena of human intelligence (not just immediately, but later A La Recherche du Temps Perdu).
P.S. I also came across this lesson that AGI forecasting must stop (I used to make similar mistakes elsewhere).
"We've been at it since mid-1998, and we estimate that within 1-3 years from the time I'm writing this (March 2001), we will complete the creation of a program that can hold highly intelligent (though not necessarily fully human-like) English conversations, talking to us about its own creative discoveries and ideas regarding the digital data that is its world....Of course, "1-4 years from real AI" and "1-3 years more to fully self-modifying AI" are very gutsy claims, similar to other claims that have been made (and not fulfilled) throughout the history of AI. But we believe that, due to the combination of advances in computer hardware and software with advances in various aspects of cognitive science, real AI really now is possible - and that we know how to achieve it, and are substantially advanced along the path to this goal."
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