Java Reference
In-Depth Information
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As programmers, however, we know that all this apparent intelligence is an
illusion. Human programmers have carefully ȓcoachedȓ the software in all
possible scenarios, and it simply replays the actions and decisions that were
programmed into it.
Would it be possible to write computer programs that are genuinely intelligent in
some sense? From the earliest days of computing, there was a sense that the
human brain might be nothing but an immense computer, and that it might well
be feasible to program computers to imitate some processes of human thought.
Serious research into artificial intelligence (AI) began in the mid-1950s, and the
first twenty years brought some impressive successes. Programs that play
chessȌsurely an activity that appears to require remarkable intellectual
powersȌhave become so good that they now routinely beat all but the best
human players. In 1975 an expert-system program called Mycin gained fame for
being better in diagnosing meningitis in patients than the average physician.
Theorem-proving programs produced logically correct mathematical proofs.
Optical character recognition software can read pages from a scanner, recognize
the character shapes (including those that are blurred or smudged), and
reconstruct the original document text, even restoring fonts and layout.
However, there were serious setbacks as well. From the very outset, one of the
stated goals of the AI community was to produce software that could translate
text from one language to another, for example from English to Russian. That
undertaking proved to be enormously complicated. Human language appears to
be much more subtle and interwoven with the human experience than had
originally been thought. Even the grammar-checking programs that come with
many word processors today are more a gimmick than a useful tool, and
analyzing grammar is just the first step in translating sentences.
From 1982 to 1992, the Japanese government embarked on a massive research
project, funded at over 50 billion Japanese yen. It was known as the
Fifth-Generation Project. Its goal was to develop new hard- and software to
greatly improve the performance of expert systems. At its outset, the project
created great fear in other countries that the Japanese computer industry was
about to become the undisputed leader in the field. However, the end results
