Some considerations on Artificial Intelligence

At the moment I am studying an amazing book written by Professor Douglas Hofstadter which title is "Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid".

In the book there is a nice section on Artificial Intelligence that I would like to share with you.

It is very difficult to figure out where the borderline between non-intelligent behavior and intelligent behavior lies. Probably there is not a very definite borderline but artificial intelligence would have to master the following abilities of humans

• to respond to situations very flexibly
• to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances
• to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages
• to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation
• to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them
• to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them
• to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new way

and most importantly

• to come up with ideas which are novel

Here lies the difficulty of Artificial Intelligence Research. By their very nature, computers  are the most flexible and rule following of beasts but they are nonetheless the epitome of unconsciousness.

How can then Intelligent Behavior  be programmed? 

I think "AI" has made a big progress during the last 20 years but I still think that it will take time for an algorithm to efficiently master the task listed in the bullet points above.

To close this article, I would like to show you a very nice picture based on Fractal Geometry. It is very nice to see how a simple mathematical loop can create such complex pictures with a computer.