Posts Tagged ‘Brain’

Replies to the Chinese Room Argument

September 4th, 2010 No comments

Criticisms of the narrow Chinese Room argument against Strong AI have often followed three main lines, which can be distinguished by how much they concede:

  1. Some critics concede that the man in the room does not understand Chinese, but hold that at the same time there is some other thing that does understand. These critics object to the inference from the claim that the man in the room does not understand Chinese to the conclusion that no understanding has been created. There might be understanding by a larger, or different, entity. This is the strategy of The Systems Reply and the Virtual Mind Reply. These replies hold that there could be understanding in the original Chinese Room scenario.
  2. Other critics concede Searle’s claim that just running a natural language processing program as described in the CR scenario does not create any understanding, whether by a human or a computer system. However, these critics hold that a variation on the computer system could understand. The variant might be a computer embedded in a robotic body, having interaction with the physical world via sensors and motors (“The Robot Reply”), or it might be a system that simulated the detailed operation of an entire brain, neuron by neuron (“the Brain Simulator Reply”).
  3. Finally, some critics do not concede even the narrow point against AI. These critics hold that the man in the original Chinese Room scenario might understand Chinese, despite Searle’s denials, or that the scenario is impossible. For example, critics have argued that our intuitions in such cases are unreliable. Other critics have held that it all depends on what one means by “understand” points discussed in the section on the Intuition Reply. Others (e.g. Sprevak 2007) object to the assumption that any system (e.g. Searle in the room) can run any computer program. And finally some have argued that if it is not reasonable to attribute understanding on the basis of the behavior exhibited by the Chinese Room, then it would not be reasonable to attribute understanding to humans on the basis of similar behavioral evidence (Searle calls this last the “Other Minds Reply”).

In addition to these responses, Critics also independently argue against Searle’s larger claim, and hold that one can get semantics (that is, meaning) from syntactic symbol manipulation, including the sort that takes place inside a digital computer, a question discussed in the section on syntax and semantics.

Approaches to AI

September 4th, 2010 No comments

The researchers have branched Artificial Intelligence into different approaches, but they had the same goal of creating intelligent machines. Let us introduce ourselves to some of the main approaches to artificial intelligence. They are divided into two main lines of thought, the bottom up and the top down approach:

Neural Networks

Neural Network

Image via Wikipedia

This is the bottom up approach. It aims at mimicking the structure and functioning of the human brain, to create intelligent behavior. Researchers are attempting to build a silicon-based electronic network that is modeled on the working and form of the human brain! Our brain is a network of billions of neurons, each connected with the other.

At an individual level, a neuron has very little intelligence, in the sense that it operates by a simple set of rules, conducting electric signals through its network. However, the combined network of all these neurons creates intelligent behavior that is unrivaled and unsurpassed. Therefore, these researchers created network of electronic analogues of a neuron, based on Boolean logic. Memory was recognized to be an electronic signal pattern in a closed neural network.

How the human brain works is, it learns to realize patterns and remembers them. Similarly, the neural networks developed have the ability to learn patterns and remember. This approach has its limitations due to the scale and complexity of developing an exact replica of a human brain, as the neurons number in billions! Currently, through simulation techniques, people create virtual neural networks. This approach has not been able to achieve the ultimate goal but there is a very positive progress in the field. The progress in the development of parallel computing will aid it in the future.

Expert Systems

﻿This is the top down approach. Instead of starting at the base level of neurons, by taking advantage of the phenomenal computational power of the modern computers, followers of the expert systems approach are designing intelligent machines that solve problems by deductive logic. It is like the dialectic approach in philosophy.

This is an intensive approach as opposed to the extensive approach in neural networks. As the name expert systems suggest, these are machines devoted to solving problems in very specific niche areas. They have total expertise in a specific domain of human thought. Their tools are like those of a detective or sleuth. They are programmed to use statistical analysis and data mining to solve problems. They arrive at a decision through a logical flow developed by answering yes-no questions.

Chess computers like Fritz and its successors that beat chess grandmaster Kasparov are examples of expert systems. Chess is known as the drosophila or experimental specimen of artificial intelligence.