Subject: Artificial Intelligence vs. Natural Stupidity

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2002 20:38:19 +0300 (IDT)

I had a small talk with my "Design and Analysis of Algorithms" Lecturer,
Prof. Hugo Krawczyk. He told me that he got involved in Computer Science,
by doing a first degree in Matehmatics and then realizing it won't put
food on his table. When he served in the army, he coded some game solving
program on a computer that was present there, and when he returned to the
Technion after his service, he decided to study AI at the CS department.

He then said, that he realized that sometimes having natural stupidity was
better than having artificial intelligence. He exaplained that by saying
that Artificial Intelligence involves a lot of brute forced methods, that
are now guaranteed to perform well. I believe the end of the story was
that he switched to Crypto{logy,graphy} and Pure Algorithmics.

During my game AI musing (I am by no means an AI expert) I did notice that
my methodologies worked most of the time, but none of them could worked
all the time. Eventually (quite recently, in fact) I was able to construct
meta-scans that parallelized several searches, and that has a greater
overhaul performance.

However, it's just a heuristic and I cannot prove that it will take a
smaller time than either alternative. I know another Freecell solver
author who prioritized several type of moves and then wrote a genetic
algorithm to come with optimal weights. The result was a very fast scan.

In contrast, I once analyzed a game by the name of ToggleSquares[1] and
was able to find an algorithm that works in O(n^2) time (where n^2
was the size of the board) and prove its correctness mathemtically.[2]

One could argue that the human mind is itself a heuristic and does not
guarantee to yield good or even correct results in a limited time span.
So, emulating it with human-created heuristics is not a bad strategy.

In any case, this does question whether AI is a "pure" CS field, or that
it's more of an experimental field.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

[1] - http://www.ida.net/users/housley/atag.htm

[2] - http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/MathVentures/toggle_squares.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"