AI and cognitive psychology rant

[Isaac To]

>>>>> "Alex" == Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> writes:

    Alex> Chess playing machines such as Deep Blue, bridge playing programs
    Alex> such as GIB and Jack ..., dictation-taking programs such as those
    Alex> made by IBM and Dragon Systems in the '80s (I don't know if the
    Alex> technology has changed drastically since I left the field then,
    Alex> though I doubt it), are based on brute-force techniques, and their
    Alex> excellent performance comes strictly from processing power.

Nearly no program would rely only on non-brute-force techniques.  On the
other hand, all the machines that you have named uses some non-brute-force
techniques to improve performance.  How you can say that they are using
"only" brute-force techniques is something I don't quite understand.  But
even then, I can't see why this has anything to do with whether the machines
are intelligent or not.  We cannot judge whether a machine is intelligent or
not by just looking at the method used to solve it.  A computer is best at
number crunching, and it is simply natural for any program to put a lot more
weights than most human beings on number crunching.  You can't say a machine
is unintelligent just because much of it power comes from there.  Of course,
you might say that the problem does not require a lot of intelligence.

Whether a system is intelligent must be determined by the result.  When you
feed a chess configuration to the big blue computer, which any average
player of chess would make a move that will guarantee checkmate, but the
Deep Blue computer gives you a move that will lead to stalemate, you know
that it is not very intelligent (it did happen).

Regards,
Isaac.