Toward Human-Level Machine

Intelligence

Lotfi A. Zadeh
Computer Science Division
Department of EECS
UC Berkeley

ICTAI’06
Washington D.C.
November 14, 2006
URL: http://www-bisc.cs.berkeley.edu
URL:http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zadeh/
Email: Zadeh@eecs.berkeley.edu
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 PREAMBLE

 We are in the midst of what is popularly

called the information revolution—a
revolution which was born shortly after
the end of World War II.

 As a student at MIT and later as an

instructor at Columbia University, I
witnessed the birth of this revolution
and observed at close distance its
progression and impact

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 THE BEGINNING OF THE AGE OF
INFORMATION AND CONTROL
Three major events (ca.1946)heralded the
beginning of the age of information and
control

 Invention of the transistor

 Debut of cybernetics (Wiener)
 Debut of information theory (Shannon)

I heard the first presentation by Shannon of his

work at a meeting in New York, in 1946, and
was deeply fascinated by his ideas. His
lecture opened a new world
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 THE NEW WORLD

 The new world was the world of machine

intelligence and automated reasoning

 It was widely believed that there were no

limits to what machines could do

 The era of thinking machines has arrived

 Inspired by what I saw, heard and read, I

wrote an article about thinking machines
which was published in a student magazine

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 THINKING MACHINES—A NEW FIELD IN
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
Lotfi A. Zadeh
“Psychologists Report Memory is Electrical,”
“Electric Brain Able to Translate Foreign Languages
is Being Built,” Electronic Brain Does Research,”
“Scientists Confer on Electronic Brain,”—these are
some of the headlines that were carried in
newspapers throughout the nation during the past
year. What is behind these headlines? How will
“electronic brains” or “thinking machines” affect our
way of living? What is the role played by electrical
engineers in the design of these devices? These are
some of the questions that we shall try to answer in
this article.
6/49Columbia Engineering Quarterly, January 1950 LAZ 10/13/2006
 CONTINUED

Through their association with

mathematicians, electrical engineers working
on thinking machines have become familiar
with such hitherto remote subjects as
Boolean algebra, multivalued logic, and so
forth. And it seems that the time is not far
distant when taking a course in mathematical
logic will be just as essential to a graduate
student in electrical engineering as taking a
course in complex variable is at the present
time. Time marches on.

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 EXAGGERATED EXPECTATIONS

One of the headlines read "Electric Brain

Capable of Translating Foreign Languages is
Being Built." Considering that the only
computers that were in existence at that time
were relay computers, gives an idea of the
depth of underestimation of the difficulty of
building machines that can come close to
human-level intelligence. Today, close to
sixty years later, we have machine
translation programs but their performance
leaves much to be desired.

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 EXAGGERATED EXPECTATIONS

 On the occasion of inauguration of IBM’s

Mark 1 relay computer in 1948, Howard
Aiken, Director of Harvard’s Computation
Laboratory, had this to say:

There is no problem in applied mathematics

that this computer cannot solve

 In 1953, Burroghs Corporation started a

project to design, manufacture and market a
phonetic typewriter
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 EXAGGERATED EXPECTATIONS

 Like others, I had exaggerated

expectations. Here is an example
drawn from my 1950 paper.

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 A GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE (LAZ 1950)

 It is 1965. Three years ago for reasons of

economy and efficiency the trustees of
Columbia University have decided to disband
the Office of University Admissions and to
install in its place a thinking machine to be
called the Electronic Director of Admissions.
 Installation was completed in the spring of
1964, and since then the Director has been
functioning perfectly and has won
unanimous acclaim from administration,
faculty and student body alike
Columbia
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 ELECTRONIC DIRECTOR OF ADMISSIONS (1950)

probabilistic if-then rules

encoding
record (a1, …, an)
accept if Prob {Event (a1, …, an)}   and Condition D
Event: survive first year
Condition: registration  N
If X is A and Prob (Y is B|X is A) is C and Condition is D
then Action is E

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 BRILLIANT SUCCESSES AND
CONSPICUOUS FAILURES

successes
 landing men on the moon
 GPS systems
 search engines
 bioinformatics

failures
 summarization
 simultaneous translation
 automation of driving in city traffic
 tennis-playing robot

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INFORMATION SYSTEMS / INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

INTELLIGENT
INFORMATION
SYSTEMS
REVOLUTION
REVOLUTION

INTERNET SMART CAMERAS

WORLD WIDE WEB SMART APPLIANCES
WIRELESS TELEPHONY SMART CARS
FAX SMART ELEVATORS
DIGITAL LIBRARIES SMART ROBOTS
DATA MINING INTELLIGENT MANUFACTURING
INFORMATION RETRIEVAL EXPERT SYSTEMS
… SMART SEARCH ENGINES
SMART QUALITY CONTROL
…
Measure of intelligence: MIQ (Machine Intelligence Quotient)
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 MACHINE INTELLIGENT QUOTIENT (MIQ)
(ZADEH 1993)
Dimension of MIQ
 handwriting recognition
 speech recognition
 natural language understanding
 summarization
 disambiguation
 image understanding and pattern recognition
 diagnostics
 unstructured storage and retrieval of information
 execution of high level instructions (expressed in NL)
 learning
 reasoning
 planning
 problem solving
 decision making
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 INFORMATION /INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS (I/IS)

intelligent systems
intelligent information systems
information systems
Information/intelligent systems= information systems +
intelligent systems +
intelligent/information systems
 information/intelligent systems are emerging as the primary
component of the infrastructure of modern societies
 conception, design, construction and utilization of
information/intelligent systems constitute the core of
modern science and technology
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 ULTIMATE GOAL

Intelligent Decision Systems

SUBGOAL

Intelligent Information Systems

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 INFORMATION SYSTEM vs. INTELLIGENT
INFORMATION SYSTEM
SIEMENS FUZZY PARKING CONTROL (1996)

Parking
garage

Parking Garage Marienplatz FULL

Parking Garage Stachus FREE

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 INFORMATION/INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS
(I/IST)
 Information/intelligent systems are becoming
a reality
 But why did it take so long?
 The necessary technologies and
methodologies were not in place
 Key technologies: advanced computer
hardware and software
advanced sensor hardware
and software
 Key methodology: soft computing
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 TIMELINE OF GROWTH OF MIQ (LAZ)

MIQ
Human-level intelligence

1960 1980 2000

+ perception-based AI

logic-based AI New AI: symbolic logic +

(symbolic AI) probability theory

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 ACHIEVEMENT OF HUMAN-LEVEL
MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
 Humans have a remarkable capability to
perform a wide variety of physical and
mental tasks without any measurements and
any computations. Familiar examples are:
driving in city traffic; summarizing a story;
and playing tennis.
 In performing such tasks humans employ
perceptions—perceptions of distance, speed,
direction, intent and other attributes of
physical and mental objects.

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 CONTINUED

 Limitations of today’s AI reflect the

incapability of existing AI techniques to
deal with perception-based information.
 What is widely unrecognized is that to
achieve human-level machine
intelligence it is necessary to endow AI
with the capability to deal with
perception-based information.

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 INFORMATION

INFORMATION

measurement-based perception-based
numerical linguistic
•it is 35 C° •It is very warm
•Eva is 28 •Eva is young
•probability is 0.8 •probability is high
• •it is cloudy
• •traffic is heavy
•it is hard to find parking
near the campus
• measurement-based information may be viewed as special case of
perception-based information
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 BIRTH OF AI
Officially, AI was born in l956. At its
birth there was widespread expectation
that within a few years it will be
possible to build machines that could
think like humans. The AI pioneers,
notably John McCarthy, Herbert Simon,
Allen Newell and Neils Nilsson, but not
Marvin Minsky, were firm believers in
the ability of classical symbolic logic to
lead to human-level machine
intelligence.
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 CONTINUED
I did not share that belief because the
world of symbolic logic is an unreal
world in which there is no imprecision,
no uncertainty and no partiality of
knowledge, truth and class
membership. The world of symbolic
logic is an idealized model of the real
world. 

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 NEW AI
For the AI establishment, anything that
involved numerical computations was
unwelcome. It took close to thirty years
for probability theory to gain grudging
acceptance. In large measure, it was
the work of Judea Pearl that made
probability theory respectable. Today,
so-called "New AI" is probability-based.
Indeed, Bayesianism has become as
fashionable as symbolic logic was in its
time.
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 CONTINUED
Clearly, adding probability theory to the
armamentarium of AI is a step in the
right direction. But is it sufficient? In
my view, the answer is: No.

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 CONTINUED
 This view was advanced in my paper “A New
Direction in AI—Toward a Computational
Theory of Perceptions,” which was published
in the AI Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 1, 73-84, 2001.
The initial reviews of my paper were critical.
Eventually, my paper was accepted for
publication with its provocative title.
 My principal conclusion was that to achieve
human-level machine intelligence it is
necessary to have a capability to deal with
perception-based information.

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 THE PROBLEM OF IMPRECISION
Perceptions are intrinsically imprecise,
reflecting the bounded ability of human
sensory organs and ultimately the
brain, to resolve detail and store
information. It is this imprecision that
places computation and reasoning with
perceptions beyond the reach of
symbolic logic and probability theory.

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 A NEW DIRECTION
My AI Magazine paper outlined what
may be called the computational theory
of perceptions. The key idea in this
theory is that of dealing with
perceptions through their descriptions
in a natural language. In other words, a
perception is equated to its description,
and computation with perceptions is
reduced to computation with
information which is described in
natural language.
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 CONTINUED
For this purpose, what is employed is
fuzzy logic—a logic which mirrors the
remarkable cability of human mind to
reason with information which is
imprecise, uncertain and partially true.

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 CONTINUED
The distinguishing features of fuzzy
logic are graduation and granulation.
More specifically, in fuzzy logic
everything is or is allowed to be
graduated, that is, be a matter of
degree, or equivalently, fuzzy.
Furthermore, in fuzzy logic every
variable is or is allowed to be
granulated, with a granule being a
clump of values which are drawn
together by indistinguishability,
similarity or proximity.
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 CONTINUED
A granule may be interpreted as a
representation of one’s state of
knowledge regarding the true value of
the variable. As a simple example, Age
is granulated when its granular values
are assumed to be young, middle-aged
and old. Graduation and granulation
play essential roles in human
cognition.

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 THE CONCEPT OF GRANULAR VALUE

A
granular value of X

a singular value of X
universe of discourse

 singular: X is a singleton
 granular: X isr A granule
 a granule is defined by a generalized constraint
example:
X: unemployment
a: 7.3%
A: high
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 GRANULATION OF A VARIABLE
 continuous quantized granulated

Example: Age

µ µ middle-
young aged old
1
1

0 0 Age
quantized Age
granulated

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 GRANULATION OF A FUNCTION

Y f granule
L

M
S
0
0
Y
medium x large S M L
f* (fuzzy graph) perception
f summary f* :
if X is small then Y is small
if X is medium then Y is large
0 X if X is large then Y is small
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 ANALOGY
 In bivalent logic, one writes and draws with a
ballpoint pen
 In fuzzy logic, one writes and draws with a
spray pen which has an adjustable and
precisely defined spray pattern
 This simple analogy suggests many
mathematical problems

X
 What is the maximum value of f?
 Precisiation/imprecisiation principle
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 A BIT OF HISTORY

 A precursor of fuzzy logic was the

theory of fuzzy sets. Informally, a fuzzy
set is a class without unsharp
boundaries, e.g., the class of beautiful
women, the class of honest men, and a
class of historical monument. My first
paper on fuzzy sets appeared in 1965.

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 CONTINUED

 Its reception was mixed and mostly

critical. My best friend, Richard
Bellman, the father of dynamic
programming was one of the few who
welcomed the idea. This is what he
wrote when I sent him the manuscript
of my paper, “Fuzzy Sets.”

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 CONTINUED
Journal of Mathematical Analysis and
Applications

Dear Lotfi:
I think that the paper is extremely
interesting and I would like to publish it in
JMAA, if agreeable to you. When I return,
or while in Paris, I will write a companion
paper on optimal decomposition of a set
into subsets along the lines of our
discussion.

Cordially,

Richard Bellman
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 CONTINUED

 Many others were not so kind. Here is a sample.

Following the presentation of my first paper on
the concept of a linguistic variable, Professor
Rudolf Kalman, a brilliant scientist and a good
friend of mine, had this to say:

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 CONTINUED

“I would like to comment briefly on

Professor Zadeh’s presentation. His
proposals could be severely, ferociously,
even brutally criticized from a technical
point of view. This would be out of place
here. But a blunt question remains: Is
Professor Zadeh presenting important
ideas or is he indulging in wishful
thinking?

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 CONTINUED

No doubt Professor Zadeh’s enthusiasm

for fuzziness has been reinforced by the
prevailing climate in the U.S.—one of
unprecedented permissiveness.
‘Fuzzification’ is a kind of scientific
permissiveness; it tends to result in
socially appealing slogans
unaccompanied by the discipline of hard
scientific work and patient observation.”

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 CONTINUED
In a similar vein, my esteemed
colleague Professor William Kahan—a
man with a brilliant mind—offered this
assessment in 1975.

“Fuzzy theory is wrong, wrong, and

pernicious.” says William Kahan, a
professor of computer sciences and
mathematics at Cal whose Evans Hall
Office is a few doors from Zadeh’s. “I
can not think of any problem that could
not be solved better by ordinary logic.”
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 CONTINUED
“What Zadeh is saying is the same sort
of things ‘Technology got us into this
mess and now it can’t get us out.’”
Kahan says. “Well, technology did not
get us into this mess. Greed and
weakness and ambivalence got us into
this mess. What we need is more
logical thinking, not less. The danger of
fuzzy theory is that it will encourage the
sort of imprecise thinking that has
brought us so much trouble.”

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 FUZZY LOGIC—WHERE ARE WE TODAY?
METRICS

  PATENTS
Number of fuzzy-logic-related patents
applied for in Japan: 17,740
Number of fuzzy-logic-related patents
issued in Japan:  4,801
Number of fuzzy-logic-related patents
issued in the US: around 1,700

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 PUBLICATIONS
 
Count of papers containing the word “fuzzy” in title, as
cited in INSPEC and MATH.SCI.NET databases.
Compiled by Camille Wanat, Head, Engineering Library,
UC Berkeley, August 25, 2006.
 
Number of papers in INSPEC and MathSciNet which have
"fuzzy" in title:

INSPEC - "fuzzy" in title MathSciNet - "fuzzy" in title

1970-1979: 569 1970-1979: 443
1980-1989: 2,403 1980-1989: 2,465
1990-1999: 23,210 1990-1999: 5,487
2000-present: 21,919 2000-present: 5,714
Total: 48,101 Total: 14,109

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 JOURNALS (“fuzzy” or “soft computing” in title)
 
1. Fuzzy Sets and Systems
2. IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems
3. Fuzzy Optimization and Decision Making
4. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems
5. Fuzzy Economic Review
6. International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and
Knowledge-Based Systems
7. Journal of Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Systems
8. International Journal of Fuzzy Systems
9. International Review of Fuzzy Mathematics
10. Soft Computing
11. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning--Soft
Computing in Recognition and Search
12. Intelligent Automation and Soft Computing
13. Journal of Multiple-Valued Logic and Soft Computing
14. Mathware and Soft Computing
15. Biomedical Soft Computing and Human Sciences
16. Applied Soft Computing

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 SUMMATION

 Humans have a remarkable capability to

reason and make decisions in an
environment of imprecision, uncertainty and
partiality of knowledge, truth and class
membership. It is this capability that is
needed to achieve human-level machine
intelligence.
 Achievement of human-level machine
intelligence is beyond the reach of existing
AI techniques. New direction is needed.
Computational theory of perceptions is a
step in this direction.

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