Re: Where is behavior AI now?

Gordon McComb <NOSPAMgort@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:
Arkin and Murphy mean nothing to me.

Ah, but half way down in responding I read the web page below which
mentioned Arkin's book so no it means something to me. :)

Arkin, Murphy, Jones, Brooks, Braitenberg, Minsky, Papert (others I'll
leave out for now). These are all names that are regularly referenced
because they are authors of popular books on artificial intelligence
that are available at most any library, or at least a university-level
library. These are the people who have published the work progress so
far, and this is where debate usually springs from.

I don't mean to come across as haughty or as a name-dropper, but I find
that having a fairly consistent frame of reference is helpful for these
types of discussions.

Yes, they certainly are. :)

We know we're all talking the same language,
though we might not all agree what the words mean.

In any case, and forgive me if any of these are already known to you:

You don't really need to buy the Brooks book. Just download his papers.

Yeah, I know a lot is available, but I don't really like reading papers
on-line (though I do it a lot anyway) , and if I'm going to print them all
out, I'd rather just buy a book.

Robin Murphy's book is an introduction -- kind of like AI 101 -- and
you'll probably breeze through it.

I got a computer science degree in 1980 and haven't tried to keep up with
the literature since then. In the past few years Dan and others from
c.a.p. have gotten me to read all sorts of stuff that has helped get me
back up to speed (which makes it far easier to communicate as you said),
but there's still so much to catch up on. And now you have given me more.
:)

If you can't find it at the library
buy a used copy on Amazon. Or I mighr be able to find my copy and I'm
happy to send it to you if you take care of the shipping. Ron Arkin's
book is probably the seminal work used by colleges and universities to
teach AI basics. Randy has mentioned it a few times. Valentino
Braitenberg's Vehicles book needs no introduction, as it is constantly
cited in just about anything related to robotics. MIT heavy-hitters
Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert both have "mind opening" texts that I
found very enlightening. Minsky's "The Society of Mind" is a must read,

I read it a year or two ago. Minsky drops in to c.a.p. now and again and
I've communicated with him in email. So I know a lot about his work. I
went to one of his talks about 25 years ago as well.

IMO, if you're interested in AI, even if you don't agree with the good
doctor's ideas.

Yeah, it's a good book. I agree with a lot of the basic concepts. Minsky
however has always been trying to attack the AI problem from a level higher
than I think it should be attacked. Well, actually, he tried a behavior
approach to AI early in his career (the Snark (a neural controlled virtual
rat running a maze made of tubes and motors) - part of his PhD thesis in
1951) and decided that the approach could never answer some of the more
complex issues of human intelligence and he seems to have spend the rest of
his life looking in other directions. I think he had the right approach at
the beginning and shouldn't have given up on it so quickly. :)

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.