Stan takes an intelligently artificial look at the artificially intelligent artificers.
The recent article on neural networks ("The Self-Organizing Neural Network," by Joey Rogers, CUJ, June 2000) swam into my keen ken as I was re-reading Hubert L. Dreyfus' classic What Computers Can't Do. Or rather, to be as precise as Natural Language allows, I was reading for the first time his What Computers Still Can't Do, the much enlarged MIT Press edition (fifth printing, 1997) that includes the ur-text of 1972, the major revisions of 1979, and a 40+ page introduction dated 1992.
The latest (final) edition of Hubert's manifesto on "the inherent inability of disembodied machines to mimic higher mental functions" is subtitled A Critique of Artificial Reason, a philosophical in-joke (yes, philosophy has its share of inebriated barely standup comics) based on Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781) [1].
The gist of the second Dreyfus Affair [2] is that Hubert (and fellow philosophers, especially John Searle) predicted the failure [3] of what John Haugeland dubbed GOOFAI (Good Old-Fashioned AI). One by one, initially promising AI projects based on a "symbolic-processing" paradigm of human ratiocination collapsed in various combinatorial explosions (implosions?) as the "problem domain" extended beyond a few SHRDLU [4] colored polyhedral blocks. Winograd's incredible program responded to any number of NL requests including:
Find a block that is taller than the one you are holding and put it into the box.
Endless searching agonies of "if-then-elses" are needed to locate that damned target block (if such there be). The "taller than" test is laughingly trivial compared with the interpretation of the "obvious" everyday tokens "a," "is," "the," "one," "you," and "it."
Hubert survived the embarrassment of losing a chess game to a rather elementary program (haven't we amateurs all?), but DeepBlue GOOFAI, damn it, has met the old "ultimate" challenge of beating the world champion. Yet, the sneaky IBM bastards refuse a re-match now that Gar[r]y Kasparov has learned to avoid the built-in standard openings/endplays!
However, for AI to move beyond the "degenerating research program" (where is the grandiose CYC project that plans to record all needed "facts" — including "If Fred is in Kansas, so is his left foot if such he has, and provided that he is not straddling the state border"?), Hubert and his brother Stuart (Mind Over Machine) have accepted, with reservations, the promise of connectionism: neural network algorithms somehow simulating the mysterious workings of our mixed digital/analog 1012 fuzzy synaptic neurons (your count may differ).
Book Nook Postscript: A landmark publication that you must acquire (I'll lend you the $59.95 if you're broke): The C++ Programming Language — Special Edition, Bjarne Stroustrup, Addison Wesley, 2000. Visit http://www.aw.com/cseng and Bjarne's home page http://www.research.att.com/~bs/ for background info.
It's a significant update of the third 1997 edition covering the latest ISO standards and template libraries. Bjarne was reluctant to call it the fourth edition. His preferred designation (rejected by AW) was the p Edition since that reflected the approximate versional interpolation (3.14)!
References
[1] Recall the sublime Monty Python song "Immanuel Kant was a real pissant ... Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy begger ... René Descartes was a drunken fart: I drink therefore I am. ..." I can't resist mentioning that one unmentionable computer magazine (now pushing up the daisies) enforced implacable Harvard biblio-citational rules. Thus, if I referred to Einstein in a relativistic context, the big-copy-editor of the month would squiggle "First name?" — and if I quoted from Homer or Chaucer, back would come the request "Publisher? Year?" [Magazine title? —mb]
[2] Parallels with the French Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) anti-semitic scandal (1893) were irresistible — both Dreyfi were wrongly maligned, but found innocent after years of painful altercation.
[3] I'm reluctant to call any CS endeavour a "failure" simply because the initial optimistic goals were not achieved. "The reach must exceed the code. ..."
[4] SHRDLU (Non-acronym, sarconymically expanded as: Simplistic Heuristics in Reduced Domains Needing Little Understanding.) A landmark program devised by Terry Winograd, 1972, that "knew blocks." When asked why it picked up the big red block, SHRDLU replied "Because you asked me to." Some say that SHRDLU represents the seventh through twelfth most frequent letters in English, and that this fact was exploited in the keyboard layout of early typesetting machines before the merits of a random layout emerged with the QWERTYUIOP arrangement. (The Computer Contradictionary, Stan Kelly-Bootle, MIT Press, 1995.)
Stan Kelly-Bootle has been computing on and off since 1953 when he graduated from Cambridge University in Pure Mathematics and hacked on EDSAC I (the first true stored-program computer). He is a contributing editor for Linux Journal and a Jolt Judge for Software Development Magazine. With the demise of UNIX Review/Performance Computing, his 16-year-old Devil's Advocate column has moved online to www.sarcheck.com. His many books include 680x0 Programming by Example, Mastering Turbo C, Lern Yerself Scouse, The Devil's DP Dictionary, The Computer Contradictory, and Unix Complete. Under his nom-de-folk, Stan Kelly, his songs have been recorded by Cilla Black, Judy Collins, the Dubliners, and himself. Stan welcomes email via skb@atmail.net and his website http://www.crl.com/~skb/. Stan's ramblings can also be found at www.unixreview.com.