Speaking My Mind

It seems to me that one of the basic questions that haunt AI researchers is 'what have we missed?' Assuming that the goal of AI is to create intelligence with similar performance to natural intelligence; what are the key ingredients to such a capability? There is an old saw It takes 10,000 hours to master a skill There is a lot of truth to that; it effectively amounts to 10 years of more-or-less full-time focus. This has been demonstrated for many fields of activity from learning an instrument, learning a language or learning to program. But it does not take 10,000 hours to figure out if it is raining outside, and to decide to carry an umbrella. What is the difference? One informal way of distinguishing the two forms of learning is to categorize one as `muscle memory' and the other as 'declarative memory'. Typically, skills take a lot of practice to acquire, whereas declarative learning is instant. Skills are more permanent too: you tend not to forget a skill; but i...

Some time ago I was involved in a running debate about whether we should be using Ruby on Rails rather than the Java stack (junkyard?) that we were using. At the time, I did not really participate in the discussion except to note that everything seemed to be at least 5 times too difficult. I had this strong intuition that there were so many moving parts that that was the problem. The application itself was not really that hard. My assertions really ticked some of my colleagues off; for which I apologize; sort of. I guess that I come from a tradition of high-level programming languages, by high level, I would say that I would consider LISP to be a medium level language, and Prolog is slightly better. I would say that it is a pretty common theme of my career that I end up having to defend the position of using high-level tools. I have gotten a number of arguments, ranging from "it will not be efficient enough" to "how do you expect to find enough XX programmers?". I u...

As any software engineer will know, it is often easier and better to design a system that is too general for the particular task at hand and then to govern the actual behavior with a parameter. At one extreme you get sort functions with the comparator supplied as a parameter to the sort. At the other extreme you get entire policy-based frameworks where the parameters that govern the system are represented as rules. A similar phenomenon occurs in mathematics: it is often simpler to solve a more general problem than to solve the particular problem. The more general solution is often parameterized in such a way that the particular solution falls out of the general case. Recently, I learned of a use that Nature has put to the parameter, it seems that Finches' beaks may also be governed by one or two genes (BMP4) which show up in many wildly different animals (Finches, fish, butterflies, ...). I would suggest that what is going on here is that we have a general mechanism (the HOX ge...

An age ago there was a time when the solution was "meta-level", and "What was your question?" This was during the heyday of Logic Programming when it seemed that we were going to take over the world (when they woke up to it that is). Meta-programming is extremely powerful, and it seemed that there was nothing that could not be solved using some kind of meta-level approach: compilers, debuggers, abstract interpretation, program transformation, utility programming; the list had no end. Unfortunately there were, and are, some problems with meta-level programming. From a logic perspective a key problem was that you had to prove, again, the logical validity of the meta-level inferences that you made in your application. More pragmatically, there were issues with the 'standard' way of reflecting from logical formulae to data structures in Prolog that caused logical and practical problems. Like most Prolog-ers, I have been somewhat amused by the apparent enthusiasm...

Just started reading a book: Mind in a physical world. About the mind-body problem. I cannot imagine any experienced programmer having a problem with the mind-body relationship. Especially any programmer that is familiar with assembler programming. The instruction in A,$24 (from about x-ty years ago:) together with the complementary out $26,A would surely put at rest any issue with the relationship between the mind and the body. Perhaps I am missing something. I will read and find out...

I am sure that everyone who has ever dabbled in the area of Ontology has been asked that question. Personally, I have never heard a truly convincing response; even though I strongly feel that Ontologies are quite important. I recently listened to a radio segment in which someone in Algeria (I think) was complaining about the new law that required all teaching to be done in Arabic. It seems that most university-level education is in French, and that many parents try to send their kids to schools that teach in French. The issue was that Arabic simply does not have the vocabulary demanded by a modern high-tech education. Arabic is not alone in this dilemma: French itself is littered with Les mots Anglais; and English is a true hodge-podge of Anglo-Saxon, French, German, Hindu, Japanese, and many other languages. It often happens that when a culture acquires a set of concepts, it does so in the language of the originators of those concepts. It is often considerably easier to import wholes...