Scott Fahlman, August 7, 2012
Categories: AI
Those who have followed my comments in this blog will know that I’ve been advocating that AI researchers – at least a few of us – should renew our focus on flexible, integrated, human-like AI. This was the original focus of the AI field, and is still a very exciting open problem, but research with [...]
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Scott Fahlman, February 23, 2011
Categories: AI
A friend, Carl Kurlander, runs a Pittsburgh-oriented blog on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette web site. He asked if I would write up a few quick thoughts on the recent “Man vs. Computer” match on Jeopardy, so I did that. The article was written for an intelligent but non-techy audience, and is a bit more superficial than the usual [...]
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Scott Fahlman, February 12, 2011
Categories: AI
In an earlier article, I sketched a mini-theory of human scientific creativity – a theory that, I believe, is in principle implementable in an AI system. I also mentioned that, if this theory is (more or less) correct, it may suggest some techniques that we humans can employ to increase our own scientific creativity. In [...]
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Scott Fahlman, December 8, 2010
Categories: AI
As a follow-up to my previous post: I ran into this interesting New York Times article today. I think it’s pretty compatible with the view I presented in my article. The author, Benedict Carey, talks about “flashes of inspiration” in terms of exploring loose or “out of the box” connections among ideas, rather than the [...]
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Scott Fahlman, October 9, 2010
Categories: AI
Can an AI system be creative? A lot of people believe that the answer is no - obviously no. After all, we are talking about a computer program. It only does what its instructions tell it to do, and some human programmer wrote those instructions. Furthermore, computer programs are deterministic: give a program the same input [...]
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Scott Fahlman, September 7, 2009
Categories: AI
Note: A revised, updated, and slightly expanded version of this essay has been published in the inaugural issue of the new online journal, Advances in Cognitive Systems, or ACS: Fahlman, Scott E. (2012): “Beyond Idiot-Savant AI” in Advances in Cognitive Systems 1, pages 15-22. As for the photo, it doesn’t really have anything to do with [...]
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