Re: Where is behavior AI now?

Thanks, Curt, for your always insightful advice. But I have an answer
to your suggestion that "I think he had the right approach at the
beginning and shouldn't have given up on it so quickly." I did return
to work on 'low-level' systems at various times, but only became more
convinced that higher-level, more reflective systems were mainly what
distinguish us from other animals. I was disappointed when Newell and
Simon 'moved down' from high-level strategies and embraced
non-reflective rule-based systems in the 1970s, and when in the 1980s
the story-understanding researchers (and most of robotics community)
moved from semantic and conceptual analysis to low-level
situation-action rules and statistical models. So, by the mid 1980s,
there was virtually no research on higher-level thinking in the entire
AI community. (Except, perhaps, for a few like R.J. Solomonoff, who
studied the properties of very powerful (but almost uncomputable)
higher-level descriptions.)

When we organized a conference on "commonsense knowledge and reasoning"
three years ago, we searched the world and found only a couple dozen
theorists working on those areas -- as compared to the order of 100,000
people working on rules, statistical and other numerical learning
networks, and the like. My question is, why do so many people decide
to work in the very most popular fields, where very little is
discovered from each year to the next. It seems streange that they do
not recognize that those approaches have got stuck on a large and
almost flat local peak. Can anyone name 20 important discoveries
therein in the past 20 years.

Yes, there has been superficial progress. But Deep Blue learned
nothing much about games, that was not known in the 1970 -- except (as
everyone knew) that a million times faster machine could look ahead
about 4 more plies. And the DARPA road-running project showed that
(again, as everyone knew) combining different sensors can lead to
substantially better results. What else?

It seems to me that-unless one is sure of having have ideas as
original and productive as those of Hinton or Sejnowski-it would be
intellectual suicide to commit oneself to those popular areas.
Whereas, it seems clear to me that future progress will be mainly in
the area of reflective, meaning-based, knowedge-using systems. And
there are still only a handful of workers in those areas!

I suggest that readers of this group take a look at "The Emotion
Machine". The full text, more or less, is on my home page. (The book
will be published in November, with a lot of small changes and
corrections, and a couple of small newer theories-but the web version
has the most important high-level ideas that I've had since "The
Society of Mind" twenty years ago.

However, the two books are almost completely different: SoM is
generally 'bottom-up' while TEM is top-down, and they mainly intersect
only at the lower levels of knowledge representation. So let's see a
few more of you guys look toward some more powerful goals!

Curt Welch wrote:
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/

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