AI; Monsters, duck!

At 09:31 PM 2001-08-10 -0500, Ken Williams wrote:
>[...] Several times I've heard a definition of AI that I like: "AI is
>the study of any process we don't understand.  Once we understand it,
>it's no longer an AI topic." [...]

Yes, in my eternal lexicographic quest for a good definition of "AI",
/that/ is the only one I've stumbled on that strikes me as insightful.

Daniel Hillis uses roughtly that definition in an interview with him, at:
  http://freshair.npr.org/dayFA.cfm?display=day&todayDate=10%2F26%2F1998
Select the Real Audio ("Listen...") link, and then fast forward to about
11:30.
Among the examples of things people called AI, and are ceasing to call AI
(because we understand it), are:  voice recognition, spelling correction,
and computer vision.

(The one about AI being about "getting to do computers to do things that in
a human would require intelligence" is not quite as useful, I think.)


There's also a new(ish) sense of "AI" (which I thought /very/ strange when
I first ran into it), to mean what I remember previously being called
"strategy" -- basically the code that has things in a game acting
intelligently.  I.e., you shoot at the monster, and it's supposed duck to
avoid getting hit.  I'd consider "AI", in the old sense, applicable to
situations where you want the computer to be a clever opponent in a game of
strategy (chess, go, things that seem to require game-tree-like analysis
but that then need heuristics to prune the game tree, etc).  But it seems a
bit of a stretch to me to apply "AI" (in the old sense) to the code that
says little more than "monsters should duck when someone in their field of
vision starts to point a gun at them; oh, and keep moving, but don't try to
walk thru solid objects".

But it's understandable how that usage (presumably) got started:  graphics
and sound programmers working on commercial games needed someone to make
the monsters move and duck, and someone told them that that's what you use
AI for!
(cf http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19981120/gameai_01.htm etc)
This probably sounded plausable to them (in my experience, commercial game
programmers are happy to think that anything not centered on bitwise-AND
operations is probably AI, and therefore Not Their Problem), and they
applied the term to whatever made the monsters move, regardless of whether
it was ten dumb lines of C, or a whole complicated neural net system
written in embedded Icon that eats 30% of processor resources.

Ahwell, it's in established jargon now, thus enabling whole generations of
people who play inane games involving a first person shooter to bitch about
"this crappy AI! The monsters just keep trying to walk thru walls! AI SUCKS!".


--
Sean M. Burke  [email protected]  http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/