Artificial Intelligence: Working backwards from HAL
Published: 27 Mar 2006 15:40 BST
...intelligence. This was the era in which there was also much speculation about the impact of intelligent computers, computers like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Fifth Generation project
In response to this high level of optimism Japan's Ministry of Information and Trade decided to push for a great leap forward, and announced in 1982 a project to develop massively parallel computers that would they believed make machine intelligence possible. This became known as the Fifth Generation project.
American government and business quickly responded by setting up the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), and pumping money for AI research into the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This competitive atmosphere meant that over the next decade large amounts of money were poured into AI research in both the US and Japan.
This quickly led to a flood of new ideas, expert systems quickly became knowledge-based systems with the development of logic based on Bayesian probabilities that offered new ways to classify, store and use human knowledge. Early work on perceptrons developed into 'neural networks' that held the promise of being able to model biological neural structures that could not only function as pattern classifiers but could also learn. Search strategies were improved. The concept of intelligent agents was developed, and new learning strategies such as genetic algorithms were devised. There were also considerable advances in areas such as machine vision, natural language processing, and voice recognition.
The AI bubble bursts
The ultimate goal of all this research effort and expenditure, the creation of an intelligent machine eluded the researchers, and by the early 1990s it was starting to become clear that the hoped for great leap forward in AI was not going to happen as quickly as people had thought 10 years earlier. Government and corporate enthusiasm disappeared, funds started to dry up, DARPA withdrew most of its support, and research projects were shelved. This was the AI equivalent in the early 1990s of the dot-com bubble a decade later.
Researchers' failure to develop a general-purpose intelligent system was largely blamed on the fact that they had put most of their faith into the concept that the key to intelligence lay in symbolic reasoning. This is a mathematical approach in which ideas and concepts are represented by symbols such as words, or sentences, can be processed according to the rules of logic.
This was of course the long-standing idea amongst AI researchers that there is a fundamental set of algorithms that if supplied with enough information will eventually produce an intelligent system. Once discovered, such general algorithms, computer scientists had believed, would then be applicable to all areas of AI research, from natural-language processing to machine vision.
Loss of funding
This lack of success in finding such general algorithms, coupled with the loss of a very large proportion of the research funding for AI, led most of the researchers who remained to concentrate on niche areas where success, and therefore a return on research investment, was most likely. Research into AI largely disappeared to be replaced by a number of more-focussed disciplines that shared one thing in common: the need for a certain amount of machine intelligence or learning capability.
Many of the early projects continued. The development of game-playing programs reached a high point in 1997 with the defeat by a computer system from IBM called Deep Blue of chess grand master Gary Kasparov. Eliza was developed and refined, and in 1995 Richard Wallace developed Alice, a program that is now the world's most successful chatbot. Indeed such AI programs have reached a level of sophistication that allows them to be routinely used in interactive Web sites and automated telephone services by many companies, including Coca Cola and Burger King. Meanwhile mobile robots directly descended from Shakey have successfully explored the surface of Mars.
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