Information Research Weblog

The history of 'artificial intelligence' is a curious one - bold claims thirty years ago that the problems would be solved in a decade seem to have come to nought and there have been at least two waves of funding that produced very little except a number of commercially sensitive expert systems in the financial services industry.

I was intrigued, therefore, to come across an article in Salon, by John Sundman, about the founder of the Loebner Prize, one Hugh Loebner - manufacturer of restraining ropes for banks and restaurants and roll-up illuminated disco floors, and advocate of the rights of sex workers. Loebner founded the Prize to reward the first programme that could pass the Turing Test ("...Turing put forward the idea of an 'imitation game', in which a human being and a computer would be interrogated under conditions where the interrogator would not know which was which, the communication being entirely by textual messages. Turing argued that if the interrogator could not distinguish them by questioning, then it would be unreasonable not to call the computer intelligent.") The article - a LONG one in two parts, chronicles the problems that have beset the Prize, largely it seems at Loebner's own instigation!

However, the AI protagonists don't come out of the account very well either. It seems that 'artificial intelligence' is no longer the approved term. As one of John Sundman's interviewees says:

"In the professional and academic circles the term Artificial Intelligence is passé. It is considered to be technically incorrect relative to the present day technology and the term has also picked up a strong Sci-Fi connotation. The new and improved term is Intelligent Systems. Under this general term there are two distinct categories: Decision Sciences (DS) and the human mimicry side called Mimetics Sciences (MS)."

Mmmm.

Thanks to Lockergnome for the link.