I'm unsure sometimes if the AI moniker isn't misleading people as to what is really happening. We (human beings) aren't creating an artificial intelligence. We are learning about our own intelligence and then trying to put instructions to a machine so it can process them and simulate our intelligence. Beating Kasparov wasn't the result of powering up a machine and letting it learn on its own: on its own it would just sit there with a light on indicating power is passing through the on/off switch. People spent perhaps thousands of hours studying how chess experts approached the game and developed algorithms from it. I think of what they did as not so much artificial intelligence as collective intelligence in which the computer was just a medium.
That's not a correct characterization of what happened with chess. Computer chess programs do not work the same way as the human mind. The human mind uses very strong heuristics, and then simulates the game to a relatively small set of positions. We do not really understand how that heuristic part works. On the other hand, computers use very simple and weak heuristics, but search a huge space of possible moves. I'd argue that we learned relatively little about how humans play chess from chess AI. The same goes for most other kinds of AI. AI/machine learning isn't studying how the human mind does it an replicating that, it is developing a method that is effective for computers.
People often seem to miss the "artificial" part of artificial intelligence, despite it being half of the term. Any time someone says of an AI system "well yeah, but that's not real intelligence," just say "in fact, it's artificial intelligence."
Great explanation of how the process actually works for automating these complex systems. What you are describing though is how we build narrow AIs, which are considered part of the "Artificial Intelligence" portfolio.
The idea of naive learning is very much a goal of most interpretations of what "Artificial Intelligence" encompasses. The scope of the self directed learning though I think is what distinguishes between narrow AI and AGI.
Thanks for taking the time to explain this to me: I was a little off target. I don't have a background in AI but find it fascinating. (I'm preparing to undertake a formal study of it within the next 2 years. If you can recommend introductory books, I welcome it.)
