The Current State of the Art in Machine Intelligence

Abstract

Computer scientists are trying to create computer systems that exhibit intelligent behavior, in a field called artificial intelligence or simply AI. Some researchers don’t worry whether their computer systems work in the same way that human brains do. For example, most chess playing programs examine much larger numbers of possible lines of play than humans can, but cannot explain their plans for defense and attack in the way that a human chess player can. Other researchers specifically try to mimic the way human brains work. For example, there have been efforts to mimic conscious human reasoning in programs for proving mathematical theorems and even in programs for game playing. Hubert Dreyfus’s criticism was directed at such efforts that model higher-level reasoning without any model for lower-level, unconscious brain processes. Recognizing the validity of his criticism, some researchers have recently made efforts to mimic the behaviors of simpler animals without any claim to intelligence such as multi-legged robots that mimic the way insects walk.¹