Artificial Intelligence (Part I)

Task 1. Read the blocks and find in the blocks answers to the questions below.

1. What is artificial intelligence?

2. But what is intelligence?

3. Isn't there a solid definition of intelligence that doesn't depend on relating it to human intelligence?

4. Is intelligence a single thing so that one can ask a «yes» or «no» question? Is this machine intelligent or not?

5. Can AI simulate a human intelligence?

6. What about IQ? Do computer programs have IQs?

7. What is the main problem in comparing human and computer intelligence?

a) No. As we said, intelligence involves mechanisms, and AI research has discovered how to make computers carry out some of them and not others. If doing some tasks requires only mechanisms that are well understood today, computer programs can give very impressive performances on these tasks. Such programs should be considered «somewhat intelligent».

b) Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world.

Different kinds and degrees of intelligence occur in people, many animals and some machines.

c) Artificial Intelligence is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. The task of this science of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI has not to limit itself to the methods that are biologically observable.

d) No, they don’t. IQ is based on the rates at which intelligence develops in children. Later, the scale of IQ is extended to adults. It correlates well with the degree of various measures of success or failure in life. But making computers that can compete with humans score high on IQ tests would be a useless thing. For example, the ability of a child to repeat back a long sequence of digits depends on its other correlates well with other intellectual abilities, perhaps because it measures how much information the child can compute with at once. However, the same digit task is trivial for even extremely limited computers. However, some of the problems on IQ tests are useful challenges for AI.

e) Sometimes they can, but usually not. On the one hand, we can learn something about how to make machines solve problems by observing other people or our own methods. But on the other hand, most AI work needs studying the problems that the world presents to intelligence rather than studying people or animals. In studying these world problems AI researchers more often use methods that involve much more computing than people can do.

f) Not yet. There is no such definition. The problem is that we cannot yet characterize in general what kinds of computational procedures may be called intelligent. We understand some of the mechanisms of intelligence and not others.

g) Some scientists suggest that all normal humans have the same intellectual mechanisms and that difference in intelligence depends on «quantitative biochemical and physiological conditions». The difference in intelligence is expressed in differences in speed, short-term memory, and the ability to form accurate and retrievable long-term memories. As to computer programs, they have plenty of speed and memory, but their abilities correspond to the intellectual mechanisms that program designer understands well enough to put in programs. The problem is that cognitive sciences still have not succeeded in determining exactly what the human abilities are. It is likely that organization of the intellectual mechanisms for AI can be different from that in people.

Notes:

IQ – intelligence quotient, your level of intelligence, measured by a special test.