

Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start - knithx
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/6607
Got Research level questions or answers about data mining, statistical inference, machine learning, neural networks, clustering, support vector machines, genetic algorithms, heuristics and so on?<p>We want you!
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rfreytag
The first question should be "What is Artificial Intelligence?" That has
always been a surprisingly hard question for which to get a consensus answer.

EDIT: Searching shows that the definition is still all over the place. See the
comment <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982919> for an reasonable
example of disagreement over definitions.

Perhaps the question is - can any vital scientific discipline to have a simple
definition? I'm remembering the old joke where "Biology is really chemistry,
and chemistry is really physics, and physics is really mathematics."

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xtacy
Russell and Norvig's book has a nice table that talks about what the community
perceives AI to be.

Preview from Google Books: <http://goo.gl/U4Xyn>

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contextfree
This may be myopic of me but after reading Russell/Norvig I more or less
equate "AI" with "the kind of stuff in Russell/Norvig". Or, (I hope) less
lamely, it's more about a paradigm or perspective on programming - "agent-
oriented programming" - than about any particular technique or result.

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Supermighty
Am I missing something with all the separate Stack sites? Wouldn't it be
better to keep all the questions from the different sites together and create
a better tagging categorization system?

I think that having all the questions together on one site would facilitate
cross pollination and accidental information learning while simply browsing.

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T-zex
It makes Jon Skeet harder to submit answers to all the questions :) If
seriously, as a passive user I would agree with your point, but as an active
one I'de like to be a leader and such segmentation would encourage to achieve
that. Also specific sites attract proffessionals of the subject.

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Supermighty
I can see your point. I just think the same could be achieved with everything
together. Questions could be assigned a category. Each category could have
it's own associated css style and simple URL to give it a uniqueness. Also
user reputation could be calculated on a per-category basis in addition to a
site wide basis. You would end up with little kingdoms and little kings, while
keeping it all together.

Just an idea.

But with the community process of the different Stacks I have a feeling there
are reasons other than technical for the separation.

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DougBTX
I was hoping that this was going to be an article about an AI to answer
questions on Stack Overflow.

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SimonPStevens
When I first read the title I thought it was going to be how the
interconnected nodes of the stackexchange network was evolving into an AI. ;)

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iwr
Doug Lenat keeps saying that inteligence is "one million rules", throw enough
structure at something and it may come alive :)

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SimonPStevens
From stackoverflow.com -> "1,133,721 questions" (08/12/2010 15:34)

Looks like it's pretty much there then.

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iwr
Correction, "10 million rules"

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knithx
Got questions or answers about data mining, statistical inference, machine
learning, neural networks, clustering, support vector machines, genetic
algorithms, heuristics and so on?

We want you!

~~~
j4mie
Why are genetic algorithms included? They are just a tool to explore
multidimensional search spaces, and have nothing to do with AI unless they
happen to be applied to an AI problem.

It would be nice if this was separated out into "old-fashioned" AI (data
mining, statistical inference, machine learning, etc) and bio-inspired
technologies (genetic algorithms, cellular automata, neural networks -
although the latter may be a grey area).

Alternatively, a better name than "Artificial Intelligence" should have been
used for the site. Probably too late now though..

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brendano
The definition in the Russell and Norvig textbook is nice: "computational
rationality"

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khafra
...but given the widely-accepted computational theory of mind, humans are
artificial intelligences too.

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dhs
Excuse me, but I'd really like to see your evidence of how the computational
theory of mind is "widely accepted".

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khafra
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind>

> This view is common in modern cognitive psychology and is presumed by
> theorists of evolutionary psychology.

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iskander
> common in modern cognitive psychology

Only among a small besieged minority-- the majority have moved on to
neurocognitive research.

>and is presumed by theorists of evolutionary psychology

That's just straight-up wrong. Perhaps there's some theorist who buys into it,
but it's certainly not common.

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iskander
Situations where I see the term "artificial intelligence" used:

(1) a legacy hold-over from the bad old days when people thought symbolic
inference was central to human intelligence (e.g. AAAI, JAIR)

(2) research on extending old-fashioned AI to be actually useful (e.g. Markov
Logic Networks)

(3) most commonly (as in this case), a vaguely defined desired outcome and a
bundle of poorly understood cool-sounding techniques.

"We'll making computers learn-- with neurons! And Evolution! And Prolog?"

