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AIList Digest Volume 1 Issue 031
AIList Digest Wednesday, 3 Aug 1983 Volume 1 : Issue 31
Today's Topics:
Fifth Generation - Opinion & Book Review
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Date: Sat 30 Jul 83 21:39:16-PDT
From: PEREIRA@SRI-AI.ARPA
Subject: 5th generation
I think that there is a widespread misconception on ICOT and the 5th
generation project. Here are my comments on a recent message to this
bulletin board:
From what I have been able to gather from reading all the
info from ICOT (the Japanese project directorate) they are
trying to do the project by getting foreign experts to come
and tell them how. They anounce their project, say they're
going to lead the world, and wait for the egos of other
scientists to bring them there to show them how to really do
it.
I know personally several people that have visited ICOT, have talked
at length with two of them and read trip reports by others. In their
visits, there was very little if any suggestion tht they should
participate on the day to day effort at ICOT or give detailed reports
on their work. The character of the visits was very much that of an
academic visit where the visitor goes on doing his current work and
sees what the hosts are up to. They were also very open with their
(very concrete and under way) plans. The image of the ICOT worker
waiting axiously to be told what to do seems the opposite of reality,
and in fact they sometimes seem too busy with their own work to give
their visitors any more than the minimum courtous attention. As far
as I can tell, the goal of the invitations is to foster goodwill and
understanding of ICOTs goals.
The papers I've read show a few good researchers with real
good ideas but little in the way of knowing how to get them
working.
ICOT has a very clear plan of creating a line of successively faster
and more sophisticated "inference machines". The first, the personal
sequential inference machine (PSI), a specialized Prolog machine, is
being built now, and there is no reason to believe that it will not be
completed in time. They are also doing research in parallel
architectures and database machines.
On the other hand, data flow, speech understanding, systolic
arrays, microcomputer interfaces to 'supercomputers' and
high BW communications are all operational to some degree in
the US, and are being improved on a daily basis. I would
therefore say that unless we show them how, we will be the
leaders in this field, not they.
I have looked, and I know people who have looked much more carefully,
at the usefulness of current fashions in parallel architectures for
general deductive inference engines. The picture, unfortunately, is
not brilliant. Given that ICOT are comitted to logic programming and
deductive mechanisms in general, there isn't that much that they could
borrow from that work. That is, they are taking genuine research
risks. To explain fully why I think most current architectures are not
appropriate for logic programming/deduction would take me too far
afield. I will just point out that logic programming/deduction involve
dealing with incompletely specified objects (terms with uninstantiated
variables) that can be specified further in many alternative ways (OR
parallelism). Implementation of this kind of parallelism in currently
BUILT architectures would involve either wholesale copying or a high
cost in accessing variable bindings.
Fernando Pereira
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Date: 01 Aug 83 1422 PDT
From: Jim Davidson <JED@SU-AI>
Subject: The Fifth Generation (book review)
BC-BOOK-REVIEW Undated By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT c. 1983 N.Y. Times
News Service
THE FIFTH GENERATION. Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer
Challenge to the World. By Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck.
275 pages. Illustrated with diagrams. Addison-Wesley. $15.75.
This isn't just another of those books that says Japan is better
than we are and therefore is going to keep on whipping us in
productivity. ''The Fifth Generation'' goes considerably further than
that. It points with a trembling finger at Japan's commitment to
produce within a decade a new generation of computers so immensely
powerful that they will in effect constitute a new and revolutionary
form of wealth.
KIPS, these computers will be called, an acronym of knowledge
information processing systems. They will exploit the recent
speculation that intelligence, be it real or artificial, doesn't
depend so much on the power to reason as it does on a ''messy bunch of
details, facts, rules of good guessing, rules of good judgment, and
experiential knowledge,'' as the authors put it. They will be so much
more powerful that where today's machines can handle 10,000 to 100,000
logical inferences per second, or LIPS, the next-generation computer
will be capable of 100 million to 1,000 million LIPS.
These computers, if the Japanese succeed, will be able to interact
with people using natural language, speech and pictures. They'll
transform talk into print and translate one language into another.
Compared to today's machines, they'll be what automobiles are to
bicycles. And because they'll raise knowledge to the status of what
land, labor and capital once were, these machines will become ''an
engine for the new wealth of nations.''
Will the Japanese really pull this off, despite their supposed
tendency to be ''copycats'' instead of innovators? The authors insist
that this and other stereotypes are largely mythical; that every great
industrial nation must go through a phase of imitation. Sure, the
Japanese can do it. And even if they fail to fulfill their grand
design, they'll likely achieve enough to make it pointless for any
other nation to compete with them. Meanwhile, the United States will
assume the role of ''the first great post-industrial agrarian
society.''
It's quite an awesome picture that Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela
McCorduck have painted. What's more, they have impressive credentials
- Feigenbaum as professor of computer science at Stanford University
and a founder of TeKnowledge Inc., a pioneer knowledge engineering
company; Mrs. McCorduck as a science-writer who teaches at Columbia
and whose last book was a history of artificial intelligence called
''Machines Who Think.'' And their Jeremiad is extremely well written,
even quite witty in places. It's certainly more articulate by an order
of magnitude than ''In Search of Excellence,'' the book that defends
America's managerial potential and now sits atop the nonfiction
best-seller list.
So what are we supposed to do in the face of this awesome
challenge? The authors list various possibilities, such as joining up
with Japan or preparing for our future as the world's truck garden.
But what they'd really like to see is ''a national center for
knowledge technology'' - that is, ''a gathering up of all knowledge,''
''to be fused, amplified, and distributed, all at orders of magnitude,
difference in cost, speed, volume, and >>usefulness<< over what we
have now.''
Let that be as it may. While ''The Fifth Generation'' makes a
powerful case, there are those who believe that, between the
Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and
several interindustry groups that have been formed, we have already
been sufficiently aroused to compete in this new race for world
leadership. (The Soviet Union, by the way, is out in left field,
according to the authors.)
Whether the apocalypse it foresees is real or not, ''The Fifth
Generation'' is worthwhile reading. Pamela McCorduck is very good on
the debate over the ability of the machines to think, concluding that
the condemnation they have met has been largely political - amusingly
similar to ''the reasons given in the nineteenth century to explain
why women could never be the intellectual equals of men.'' Feigenbaum
is fascinating on his firsthand impressions of the Japanese computer
establishment. (Each of the co-authors becomes a character in the
narrative when his or her specialty happens to come up.)
Together they are lucid on what the fifth-generation machines will
be like. And there is the standard mind-bending section on future
computer applications. I particularly like Mrs. McCorduck's vision of
the geriatric robot. ''It isn't hanging about in the hopes of
inheriting your money - nor of course will it slip you a little
something to speed the inevitable. It isn't hanging about because it
can't find work elsewhere. It's there because it's yours. It doesn't
just bathe you and feed you and wheel you out into the sun when you
crave fresh air and a change of scene, though of course it does all
those things. The very best thing about the geriatric robot is that it
>>listens<<. 'Tell me again,' it says, 'about how wonderful-dreadful
your children are to you. Tell me again that fascinating tale of the
coup of '63. Tell me again ... ' And it means it.''
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End of AIList Digest
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