Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

The New York Times has an interesting article on the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It walks through the AI research milestones since 1950 (see timeline).

The article also talks about some recent development in AI.

• Stanford University is developing a robot that can use a hammer and a screwdriver to assemble an Ikea bookcase.
• Microsoft is working on the idea of “predestination”. They envision a software program that guesses where you are traveling based on previous trips, and then offers information that might be useful based on where the software thinks you are going.
• Since 2001, the voice recognition software of Tellme Networks has improved its accuracy from 37% to 74%. Tellme supplies the system that automates directory information for toll-free business listings.

One weakness of this article is that it gives a false impression about AI. It presents AI as the research of building intelligent robots (or human-like machines). The article begins with an introduction of the Stanford robotic project, and ends with a quote from an AI scientist “It’s time to build an A.I. robot. The dream is put a robot in every home.”

I strongly discourage people to think AI is all about robot building. AI is more than HAL or IBM’s Deep Blue chess playing program. AI is the science and engineering of intelligence machines, especially intelligent computer programs (see AI basic questions). In addition to robotics, other research topics of AI include speech recognition, expert systems, natural language processing, computer vision, heuristic classficiation, planning, logical inference, search, and the Semantic Web.