Re: and visual library once again

["Steve Whalen" <SteveWhalen001@hotmail.com>]

Bob Spooner wrote:
> "Steve Whalen" <SteveWhalen001@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1130049078.633311.55000@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> >
> >  <snip>  Much the way the DARPA
> > challenge of having an autonomous vehicle drive itself over 100 miles
> > through rough desert terrain was solved: not by elegant software, but
> > by practical engineering and brute force computing. In the time-frames
> > I was referring to (50 to 100 years from now), the power of today's
> > most powerful weather simulation super computers will fit inside a
> > hollowed out grain of sand.
> >
> I think you would be surprised at the elegance of some of the artificial
> intelligence techniques that are used. Where I work, we do research on and
> with autonomous vehicles. The brute force approach simply doesn't work.
>
> Bob

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to denigrate or downplay the work being done
in the field (or the work that was done for the DARPA challenge). I'm
not at all surprised that there is some very elegant work in AI being
done for autonomous vehicles.

Doing the kind of hard work you do was considered unnecessary and
"brute force" by many AI pundits of the 1960's who were going to
(within 10 years!) emulate the human brain in a computer and then just
have the computer brain learn do any task a human could do.  Marvin
Minsky's book I referred to was basically saying that was b.s. and
wasn't going to happen (which I agree with, then and now).

About every 10 years or so someone from the AI community says something
similar...  That's the crowd I was thinking of, to whom anything other
than putting a human brain in a computer and letting it figure out how
do something, is "brute force"(I'm oversimplifying again: it was quite
a battle for $$ and research grants and reputation and ego: thankfully
that never happens any more <g>).

We may get closer to being able to emulate a human brain in a hardware
computer in 100 years, but I suspect that most if not all of the
"useful" AI work that will power the robots and such I was talking
about, will come from the kind of work you do. I still think we should
continue to learn from the brain, but I think trying to program a
hardware computer to emulate how a human brain works isn't going to
magically make a "smart" computer.

I just hope Ada (or it's successor) is still around in an hundred years
and being used for the more critical components of the robots we
entrust our life to. Ironically the last time I did any serious
robotics about 10+ years ago, Forth was my language of choice for the
task at hand due to memory and hardware constraints. I guess that's a
part of the point I was trying to make: "hardware constraints" are
beginning to disappear, and will have disappeared completely in 100
years.

Steve