Word: ais
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...with the proliferation of cheap, powerful computers and the rapid growth of the Internet, there's new interest in all kinds of "intelligent" machinery--not just chess-playing supercomputers or grandiose AI research projects like CYC and Cog. The past few years have seen a burst of entrepreneurial activity in what are called intelligent agents--programs of rather more modest IQ that are nonetheless smart enough to be released on the Internet to do small, useful chores like tracking stock prices or digging for nuggets of research data...
...South Pole; but even that analogy falls short. For the rivalry between the two researchers is not merely personal (Brooks considered naming his robot Psych! just to get Lenat's goat) but deeply philosophical as well, straddling the almost theological schism that runs down the middle of contemporary AI...
...side of orthodoxy stands Lenat. Though CYC's unabashedly more-is-more approach has raised eyebrows in the field, its design remains true to one of the central tenets of classical AI: symbolic knowledge makes the mind go round. In other words, if you can write down the logical structures through which we apprehend the world, you're halfway to re-creating intelligence. And if you can program what you've written into a machine, even better. Hence the 170 person-years CYC's handlers have devoted to codifying what any five-year-old already knows...
...other hand, embodies the principles of AI's breakaway faction, the so-called bottom-up school. Inspired more by biological structures than by logical ones, the bottom-uppers don't bother trying to write down the rules of thought. Instead they try to conjure thought up by building lots of small, simple programs and encouraging them to interact. Earlier in his career, Brooks helped put this approach on the AI map by building tiny, insectlike robots--"bugbots"--that wandered around his laboratory without the benefit of any single guiding program. Cog's "mind," similarly, is just a collection of loosely...
...agents. If anybody is likely to beat him to market, it's a former student of Brooks' named Patricia Maes, founder of the M.I.T. MediaLab's Autonomous Agents group and of Agents, Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Maes and her students have devised imaginative ways to use bottom-up AI to personalize information delivery--"your news" as opposed to "the news...