Andrew mentioned "Nobody really thinks about AI anymore." Whether he meant that in general or just in the LISP community, I'm not sure. But here is some neat stuff about AI today:
* "Artificial Development is building CCortex, a massive spiking neural network simulation of the human cortex and peripheral systems. Upon completion, CCortex will represent up to 20 billion neurons and 20 trillion connections, achieving a level of complexity that rivals the mammalian brain, and making it the largest, most biologically realistic neural network ever built. The system is up to 10,000 times larger than any previous attempt to replicate primary characteristics of human intelligence." -- http://ad.com/ccortex.asp?id=1 * Back in '56 the first conference on AI was held (I think they even coined the term there) and at the time AI was clearly about creating machines that were intelligent in the same general purpose and capable manner than people are. When researchers realized just how damn difficult that was, the field shifted focus to "narrow" AI such as playing chess, logical inference (expert systems), etc. However, there has been a resurgence in recent years, among both academics and entrepreneurs, to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Whereas Deep Blue will always be a chess player, you could teach an AGI new games, jobs, languages, etc. with instructions and examples. The premiere AGI wiki is here: http://www.agiri.org/wiki/Main_Page * The Singularity Institute is concerned with how we'll be impacted by an AGI that is either smarter than human or faster thinking than human. Specifically, they want ensure that it's safe. There site is at http://www.singinst.org/ * I attended their summit this September and there is audio of the presentations: http://www.singinst.org/summit2007/ * I'll be attending the first AGI conference in March: http://www.agi-08.org/ * The founder of Palm Computing, Jeff Hawkins, has started an AI company that is attempting to go beyond the state of the art: http://www.numenta.com/ * His book "On Intelligence" is an interesting read: http://tinyurl.com/2k9tgt or http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-3812222-0482414?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193495877&sr=8-1 * Progress on reverse engineering the brain has continued and can serve as inspiration to people working on AGI, or for some researchers their plan is to take it all the way. Sorry, don't have a URL for this. * I worked a brief time for these folks who are also building AGI: http://adaptiveai.com/ (I would build it differently, hence I'm not there anymore.) * Another company, Novamente, is also working on AGI. Their system is built primarily in C++ but contains an embedded language for internal use that is purely functional. http://www.agiri.org/wiki/index.php?title=Novamente_FAQ Finally, given the accelerating progress in hardware, reverse engineering of the brain, neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science and AI research... I think it inevitable that we'll see full blown AGI in our lifetime. -Chuck -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
