Salon.com Technology | Artificial stupidity, Part 2: "If Wallace is right, the first 'intelligent' machine according to Turing's criterion will indeed be as dumb as a bag of hammers. It will win the prize without ever learning to parse pronouns or deal creatively with enthymemes."
Salon.com Technology | Artificial stupidity, Part 2: "Wallace's theory of A.I. is no theory at all. It's not that he doesn't believe in artificial intelligence, per se; rather, he doesn't much believe in intelligence, period. In a way that oddly befits a contest sponsored by a bunch of Skinnerians, Wallace's ALICE program is based strictly on a stimulus-response model. You type something in, if the program recognizes what you typed, it picks a clever, appropriate, 'canned' answer.
There is no representation of knowledge, no common-sense reasoning, no inference engine to mimic human thought. Just a very long list of canned answers, from which it picks the best option. Basically, it's Eliza on steroids.
Conversations with ALICE are 'stateless'; that is, the program doesn't remember what you say from one conversational exchange to the next. Basically it's not listening to a word you say, it's not learning a thing about you, and it has no idea what any of its own utterances mean. It's merely a machine designed to formulate answers that will keep you talking. And this strategy works, Wallace says, because that's what people are: mindless robots who don't listen to each other but merely regurgitate canned answers. "
Salon.com Technology | Artificial stupidity, Part 2: "In the professional and academic circles the term Artificial Intelligence is passé. It is considered to be technically incorrect relative to the present day technology and the term has also picked up a strong Sci-Fi connotation. The new and improved term is Intelligent Systems. Under this general term there are two distinct categories: Decision Sciences (DS) and the human mimicry side called Mimetics Sciences (MS)"
Salon.com Technology | Artificial stupidity: "But the closer one looks at the history of the Loebner Prize, the more it appears that Loebner's real offense was showing up the biggest stars in 'real' artificial intelligence as a bunch of phonies. Thirty years ago, Minsky and other A.I. researchers were declaring that the problem of artificial intelligence would be solved in less than a decade. But they were wrong, and every year the failure of computer programs to get anywhere close to winning the Loebner Prize underlines just how spectacularly off the mark they were. "
Artificial intelligence - Wikipedia: "However, it has become clear that contemporary methods using both broad approaches have severe limitations."
