Introduction Welcome to the December AI Expert. In this issue, I look at programming the Sony Aibo robot dog, the World Wide Mind, and (with some help from Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams), Ronald Reagan. But first, some truly remarkable neural network news from the University of Florida. It’s probably not yet feasible to do this at home, but it would be great to see the technology taken up by private experimenters....
Welcome to the November 2004 Newsletter. I like Prolog, and have used it as my language of choice for various applications, including expert systems, analysing financial data, and teaching AI at Oxford University. My most recent project is an algebraic manipulation system for safe spreadsheet construction, to try and reduce some of the billions of pounds lost to spreadsheet errors every year. Having declared a bias to Prolog and logic-based AI, I must add that this is not the only way to go....
Procedural Languages and AI In this newsletter we’ve looked at symbolic languages like Mozart, SML, Lisp and Prolog for developing AI applications. These languages are good for AI because they make it easier to model and manipulate the knowledge structures of a particular application domain. They allow the AI developer to more readily create working prototypes and evolve those prototypes as experience with an application grows. If AI is the art and science of making computers do interesting things not in their nature, then these languages are good for AI because they all, to one degree or another, hide programming tasks related to a computer’s nature such as data typing, memory managment and defining procedural code execution....
Diplomacy Have you ever played Hasbro’s (was Avalon Hill’s) game Diplomacy? I’ve only played it a few times but found it to be one of the best games I’d ever played. It requires seven players, each running a European country around World War I. In many ways its a classic war game, where each player has armies that can be deployed and set to attack neighboring countries and/or defend held ground....
The code from last month’s newsletter is finally available in the download area of www.ainewsletter.com. As always, any and all feedback is welcome. Also, anyone interested in contributing to the newsletter: book reviews, product reviews, overviews of areas of research, collections of good links in a topic area, editorial commentary, introductions, code examples, etc.; should send them to me as well. Applying Network Analysis to Amazon Book References PCAI issue 17....
As work slowed down for the summer, and inspired by the thriving interactive fiction (IF) community detailed in last month’s newsletter, I decided to spend more time on interactive fiction (IF) tools, so that’s what this newsletter is about. In one sense, its a specialized application area, but the issues with IF tools apply to other areas of AI as well, such as: pitfalls with “intelligent” interfaces; when to use rules versus when to use objects; and how to augment logic for a particular application area....
Fantasy Games Adventure was the first computer fantasy game. It had all of the elements we see today in Nintendo and Play Station fantasy games, where the computer has a model of an environment and the player manipulates a character in the game, travelling from place to place, encountering various challenges and puzzles along the way, collecting points for challenges met, and in general being entertained by unfolding story line and discovered scenarios....
Genetic Programming (GP) The fun thing about AI is all the biological sorts of terms used to describe cold programming algorithms, starting, of course, with the coining of the phrase “artificial intelligence” to replace the rather boring label “heuristic programming”. Genetic search algorithms follow this proud naming tradition. They are also referred to has hill-climbing search algorithms. (See Jan 2003 newsletter for discussion of genetic search and basketball schedules.) They explore a search space by mutating a given point and seeing if any of the mutations have higher values, in however height is measured, in the search space....
Interactive Web-Based Experts Like all computer programs, expert systems take input, process it, and provide output. For example, an expert system might input symptoms and output a diagnosis; input customer requirements and output a product configuration; or input a robot’s situation and output an action. In many cases the required inputs can be gathered beforehand and sent to the expert system, which then processes the input and produces the output. This might be the case in a telephone pricing module, where the facts of a particular call are known and input to the system that then applies the correct rules to determine the price for that call....
Notes The diagrams that were supposed to appear in the last two month’s newsletters didn’t display on most people’s systems. The newsletters are archived at an alternate site, www.ainewsletter.com, that has copies of the issues with the pictures. This month’s newsletter has some further applications of the fuzzy logic system developed in the February newsletter. Contact me to get the the latest version of the fuzzy logic system and the full source for this month’s examples....