Frequently Asked Questions
This page
contains answers to some of the more frequent questions asked about Corby,
Artificial Intelligence and related matters. Many of the subjects included here
are discussed with greater detail in these articles:
What is (Artificial)
Intelligence?
1.2 - What is Artificial Intelligence?
Section 2 – Questions about
Artificial intelligence
2.1 - What is an intelligent
device?
2.2 - What is the Turing Test?
2.3 - Will an artificial device ever be able to pass the
Turing Test?
2.4 - What is the Chinese Room argument?
2.5 - Is “strong AI” possible?
2.6 - Can an artificial device have consciousness?
Section 3 – Questions about
Corby
3.2 - What are Corby's main features?
3.5 – Does Corby understand what people say?
3.6 - Will Corby pass the Turing Test?
3.8 - Does Corby have free will?
3.9 – Can I use emoticons with Corby?
Section 1 – Definitions
Here is a
set of definitions of intelligence, which range from the serious to the
nonsensical, that someone compiled recently on Usenet:
Intelligence: Ability to reason. Adapt to environment. Adapt the environment to yourself. Put someone on Triton and see if they survive. Things IQ tests measure. A great painter. Common sense. Logic + memory. Metallic asteroids with super conducting strands. Bill Clinton and "triangulation." Star Trek's Data or R2D2. Jimmy Carter and differential equations. Sum of all talents (or skills). Produce radio signals that can be detected outside your solar system. Build a Dyson Sphere. What humans do. What ants do. Longevity of a species. What dolphins and humans do. What computers do. The design of the universe. Existence. What God endows on humans. Ralean UFO's DNA experiments. What's in panspermia organisms. Higher levels of consciousness. "Mind" as opposed to brain. Holy spirit (i.e. link to the "soul" data bank), and finally the biggie: Ability to imply that other posters are stupider than you.
Corby is
based on the following definition of intelligence:
Intelligence
is the ability to discover the rules that govern the relationships between
elements of the environment.
1.2 - What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial
intelligence is defined as intelligence exhibited by anything manufactured
(i.e. artificial) by humans. This also means, machine intelligence, a term used
to refer to the field of scientific investigation into the plausibility of and
approaches to creating intelligent systems using general-purpose computers.
It is the
interaction of the organism with the environment characterized by movement of
the organism, or of its parts, in space, through time, and having at least one
measurable effect on the environment.
Learning is
the process by which an intelligent organism acquires the appropriate responses
to changes in its environment. There are many learning mechanisms: One of them
is by direct experience. If you touch a hot object, you get hurt and then learn
that hot objects are not to be touched. Another major learning mechanism is by
imitation: If you see other people fleeing a lion, you learn that lions are to
be avoided. Another learning mechanism involves language and therefore it is
mainly restricted to humans: You are told explicitly how to respond to some
change in the environment.
If you
consider a species as a whole, evolution can also be considered a learning
mechanism. It provides a way for the species to better adapt to its
environment.
Information
has a very precise definition in information theory. This theory, due primarily
to Shannon, models in precise mathematical terms some aspects of a
communications channel, established between a transmitter and a receiver of
messages. According to this theory, the amount of information that a message
conveys is the base-2 logarithm of the inverse of the message’s probability.
In everyday
use, in the field of Artificial Intelligence, information is just any change in
the environment that is captured by the organism’s sensors.
The two
definitions may come together when you consider that the information captured
by the organism’s sensors from the environment (the transmitter) is used by the
organism to update its world model (the receiver).
Knowledge
is the set of all the relevant information collected by an intelligent
organism, which enables it to properly respond to changes in the environment.
A
fundamental part of the knowledge that an organism possesses, constitutes the
world model – see 1.8 below.
A
concept is a compact representation of a family of similar ideas. Concepts are
very important to intelligent organisms because they provide mechanisms for
data compression, inference and creativity. For more details see the Learning Page,
which is part of the Operation
Manual.
A world
model is the part of the intelligent organism’s knowledge that reflects the
state of the real world, as perceived by the individual. The world model is
essential for the organism to respond to solicitations from the environment,
when a required part of the real world is not available at the moment.
Inference
is the ability to draw conclusions based exclusively on the knowledge that one
possesses. There are basically two forms of inference: Inductive and deductive.
In
deductive inference one progresses from certain premises to certain
conclusions. In inductive inference, one tries to establish general principles
from a limited number of observations.
Both types
of inference are very important to intelligent systems because that is what
enables them to acquire new responses based exclusively on what they already
know.
Section
2 – Questions about Artificial intelligence
2.1 - What is an intelligent device?
An
intelligent device is some artefact that behaves, in some particular aspect,
like an intelligent living organism. As the ability to learn in a
characteristic that is common to all living organisms, an intelligent device
should also have it.
2.2 - What is the Turing Test?
In his 1950
paper “Computing Machinery And Intelligence” he proposed the following thought
experiment that he called “The Imitation Game”: Imagine a locked room with a
computer inside. Questions can be fed into the room, and its hidden inhabitant
must reply. If, based on such a dialogue, we cannot determine whether the
inhabitant is human or machine, then the machine can think.
For more
information on this take a look at The
Turing Test article.
2.3 - Will an artificial device ever be able to pass the Turing Test?
It is
doubtful. Not that this is deemed impossible by some well-established law of
physics, so, at least in theory, it is possible. The problem is that for a
machine to achieve that state is very costly, especially compared to the
benefits it would bring. For a more detailed discussion of this question take a
look at The Turing
Test article.
2.4 - What is the Chinese Room argument?
In 1980,
John Searle proposed the Chinese Room thought experiment that goes like this: A
person who understands no Chinese sits in a room into which written Chinese
characters are passed. In the room there is also a book containing a complex
set of rules (established ahead of time) to manipulate these characters, and
pass other characters out of the room. This would be done on a rote basis, e.g.
"When you see character X, write character Y". The idea is that a
Chinese-speaking interviewer would pass questions written in Chinese into the
room, and the corresponding answers would come out of the room appearing from
the outside as if there were a native Chinese speaker in the room. This whole
set-up depicts a computer executing instructions (program) to manipulate
abstract symbols.
It is
Searle's belief that such a system would indeed pass the Turing Test, yet the
person who manipulated the symbols would obviously not understand Chinese any
better than he did before entering the room. Searle proceeds to try to refute
the claims of strong AI: that if a machine were to pass a Turing test, then it
can be regarded as "thinking" in the same sense as human thought; or
put another way, that the human mind is some kind of computer running a
program.
For more
information on this take a look at The Chinese Room
article.
2.5 - Is “strong AI” possible?
Strong AI
refers to the possibility of creating a Human-level AI, in which the computer
program thinks and reasons much like a human mind.
As there is
no well-established law of physics that prevents it from happening, Strong AI
is, at least in theory, possible. Many people tried, over the years, to
demonstrate by logic reasoning that Strong AI is impossible. The most famous of
all is John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment – See 2.4
above.
Some people
refer to Strong AI as the possibility of creating a Human-like AI. This is
highly improbable – See 2.3 above.
2.6 - Can an artificial device have consciousness?
Consciousness
is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise things such as
self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the
relationship between itself and the environment. At the most basic level,
consciousness denotes being awake and responsive to the environment; this
contrasts with being asleep or being in a coma. Consciousness can be seen as a
continuum that starts with inattention, continues on sleep and arrives to coma
and death. Some people also require that the individual have some sense of its
history to demonstrate consciousness. In sum, the conscious individual must see
itself as a separate entity, located in its environment and having a history.
There is
little doubt about our ability to build machines that are “awake and responsive
to the environment” and have a history. No aspect of consciousness is, a
priori, out of our reach.
Section 3 – Questions
about Corby
Corby is an
intelligent conversation robot that simulates human verbal behaviour. Its most
distinctive features are its ability to learn and its language independence.
Corby is based on a stimulus-response model. The stimulus consists in a
statement provided by the user, which causes Corby to provide an appropriate
response.
3.2 - What are Corby's main features?
Besides its
ability to learn and its language independence, Corby provides innovative
solutions to the usual problems in Artificial Intelligence: Learning, abstraction,
inference, conceptualisation, knowledge representation and world models. But
its most important contribution to the field is in the area of semantics, one
of the thorniest problems in Artificial Intelligence. If you want to learn how
Corby is able to understand what people say, take a look at the Learning Page,
which is part of the Operation
Manual.
Yes,
according to the definition of intelligence given in 1.1.
Corby
learns from the normal interaction with its users. The basic learning model
uses a pair of paragraphs where one of them constitutes the stimulus and the
other is the appropriate response to that stimulus. This can be done
automatically during normal system use; in this case Corby will consider any
statement input by the user as the appropriate response to its previous
production. You can also submit text or HTML files for Corby to learn from, in
an autonomous way.
3.5 – Does Corby understand what people say?
Yes, at
least it behaves as if it does. For more details take a look at the Learning Page,
which is part of the Operation
Manual.
3.6 - Will Corby pass the Turing Test?
Probably
not. See 2.3 above or look at the article The Turing Test.
No. If we
ever reach that stage, it will, almost certainly take an embodied intelligent
device, that is, a robot to do that. See also 2.3 above or
look at the article The
Turing Test.
3.8 - Does Corby have free will?
No. Corby’s
responses are a deterministic function of the contents of the Knowledge base.
This, in turn, is the result of learning. Corby will behave, in principle,
exactly in the way it was told to behave. When Corby is asked a question for
which it does not have a response, it will use inference but that is also based
on what it learned before. That being said, it is not easy to predict what
Corby will say in a particular instance. A response can depend on many
variables and it is impossible to determine which ones just by looking from the
outside.
3.9 – Can I use emoticons with Corby?
Yes, and if you do
By arts and mime
In Corby’s own time
It will use them too
Feedback
Comments and suggestions about this page are welcome and should be sent
to fadevelop@clix.pt
Rev 1.0 - This page was last modified 2005-07-17
- Copyright © 2004-2005 A.C.Esteves