Artificial Intelligence Course 2009São José dos Campos, SP, April 09, 2009Homework 00`

BRAINSTORM ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Fagundes, Luciano

Avaya Inc/ INPE lfagundes@avaya.com / luciano_fagundes@yahoo.com

I. INTRODUCTIONOver the last three weeks, the AI classes went fromclassical to modern. The skeptical people got even moreskeptical and the romantic people got even more excited.Based on History, AI has been a continuous cycle of frustrations where Objectives and Expectation have beencontinuously frustrated by reality. Neural networks have been made out of geniality sparks, frustrated by one man'sopinion (Minsk) and raised from the dashes to keepfighting an endless war. Not much seems to be written onstone about AI, however, there are a few facts to come:Current AI systems seems to be on one of two categories:1) Play a magician role where computers try fooling ahuman being (Turing Test); or 2) Computers are used toclassify input and generate outputs (what could beconsidered intelligent because it is similar to some of thehuman behaviors). Neither of those categories seems to beon the original AI direction. The number one goal should be “Build a thinking machine”.A rough time-line for AI could be drawn starting withAlan Turing. That was possibly the first time a personrecognized the possibility of inserting intelligence into amachine as we know. The basic idea behind the Turing testwould be verifying experimentally if a computer braincould mislead a human in such a way that the humansubject would not be able to distinguish if he/she wascommunicating to another human or a machine. This ideahas defined the first reported method on how to qualify if amachine could be considered intelligent or not. Thismethod is not unanimously accepted but it is consideredthe mark that starts the AI field.As time goes by, the classical age of AI had theobjective of building an artificial intelligence being thatwould be able to interact and mimic the totality of thehuman behavior and rational. No need to say that they gotinto a dead-lock; Since Humans are building the machinesand Humans themselves have absolutely no idea on howtheir intellectual processes work, they have not been ableto reproduced them in a computer. Getting a little closer tothe AI modern Age, researchers have narrowed down their scope. This later cycle brought to live the expert systems.On this attempt, scientists were using computer to mimichuman experts solving specialized problems on their fieldof expertise. On this cycle, it is possible to find a fewsuccess stories. However, the complexity aroundaccumulating and organizing the set of rules to enable theexpert systems ended-up causing another wave of frustration to scientists.The Present moment of AI has been marked by the Neural Networks and their integration with the previousmethods and techniques.When mathematicians brought to life the concept of anartificial Neurone, the possibilities around those modelsseemed end-less. A simple description of a Neuron can beseen next.Figure 1: Artificial Neurone ModelOn Figure 1, the artificial neuron is composed by threemain parts. Dendrites, that collects input signals; aSummating and Activation function as the body; andOutputs sent via the Axon. Since this is not a biology paper, here is what happens from the computational perspective: Building a Neural Networks is, from a 20.000feet perspective, a really clever way to design amathematical function. Each of the Dendrites has anassociated input and a weight factor. In order to agglutinatethe received information, the body runs a balanced

Artificial Intelligence Course 2009São José dos Campos, SP, April 09, 2009Homework 00`

summation of its inputs. The input "importance" isweighted on the equation by the factor associated to itsentry Dendrite. This way, it does not matter how manyinputs there are; the activation function will aways have asingle value as its input. The activation function could beconsidered the "cell activity". The activation function isinfluenced by the inputs on each synaptic and also by athreshold value. In case the output of the activationfunction reaches at least the threshold, the result of theactivation function is the outputted to the Axon and to thenext neurones connected to it.The neurone itself is a model, the clever part is how itcan be trained to generate the required results. Assumingthat there is a set of inputs and outputs (from now on calledthe "training kit”), the training of a neural networksconsists of entering input values into the network andevaluating its outputs. If the neurone cannot match a particular output to its input, the balance factors of theDendrites are adjusted until the proper combination isfound. If the network can properly match the all inputs andoutputs from the training kit, the network is consideredtrained and is capable of using its "intelligence" to solvethe proposed problem. This way, a mathematical functionthat matches the desired inputs and outputs has beencreated. A special feature that come built-in on the neuralnetworks is that, after trained, just like any mathematicalfunction, it can extrapolate that knowledge to guessintermediary values for inputs that were not part of theoriginal training kit.Assuming that several of the Human behaviors are notmuch more than action and responses (I'm hungry -> I haveto eat, I feel pain --> I have to protect myself, etc), Neuralnetworks have found a good fit on that area. Of course thatthe Human Being, at first sight, seems to be a lot more than just action and response. In this team opinion, the neuralnetwork could be seen as a good step on the right direction.

I.A. Field Research

On a few exercises with on-line personalities (www.a-i.com), it is possible to dream with a real artificialintelligence being made. However, with a little deeper analysis and the right questions, it is also possible torealize that they are still just a dream.As good as the knowledge base of such systems are,they cannot provide context and temporal consciousnessyet. If one asks Hall about a TV show, it will promptly tellthat it loves "Seinfeld". It can tells you a lot about eachcharacter and about his favorite, George. However, it getscompletely lost when it is asked about the last week show.May be, this is just a matter of expanding the knowledge base, may be not. By now, they are not more than a clever magic trick.I consider myself part of the Classical thinkers of theArtificial Intelligence. If there is a real challenge still to beaccomplished on the Artificial Intelligence, it is thecreation of a truly artificial being. This my not beaccomplished in my life time, however, this would be thetarget for my research. On the next session, since this is nota pure scientific paper (and I do not have a scientificagenda on this area yet), I will describe the result of a brainstorm of opinions and possibilities that couldcontribute with a few more steps on the direction of creating a truly smart computer.II. COMPUTER FEELINGSI still have no idea why, but Neural Networks sound just right to me. As limited as they may be today, I do notthink that they are limited because of any internal reasons.They seem limited because the way they have been used.As great classifiers, their initial role should be of composing computer sensors. Everything from vision,tactile, hearing could take great advantage of the natural Neural Networks capabilities.Just like the neurone model, a single specializednetwork is nothing without a proper training algorithm. Onthe case of enabling a computer to think, feelings and purpose seems to be required as the driving force behindthe scenes.Evaluating the Human beings, it is possible to realizethat everybody is born without a purpose. When a new baby is born, there is absolutely no clue on why he/she was born and what his/her future will look like. Based onexternal inputs, Humans are driven to find what they likemost and what they believe to be their purposes. There isgoing to be a balance between the boy who has become adoctor just because his father wanted (born with a pre-conceived purpose) and the other boy who has become asuicide just because he was old enough and still could notfind his purpose. Both behaviors might indicate extremes, but the bottom line is that Humans may get just as lost ascomputers if they can't find their purpose. The maindifference here is that Humans' "firmware" is designed tomake sure that Humans do not give up and keep lookinguntil a purpose is found.Moving away from philosophy ground, a "clean" braincould be compared to a neural network with specializedareas for all sensors and memory. As describe before, thesingle algorithm to be hard-coded would be one thatenables the network to look for its purpose. However, thereis a key part of this concept that is missing. Sane people donot drive their actions only by external inputs. They usetheir feelings (just like me saying that Neural Networkssound good without knowing why) in order to validate