Machine Intelligence and Robotics: Report of the NASA Study Group : Final Report

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National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1980 - Artificial intelligence - 400 pages
 

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Page 442 - Generally speaking, a successful division will reduce the search time not by a mere fraction, but by a. fractional exponent. In a graph with 10 branches descending from each node, a 20-step search might involve 1020 trials, which is out of the question, while the insertion of just four lemmas or sequential subgoals might reduce the search to only 5 X 104 trials, which is within reason for machine exploration. Thus, it will be worth a relatively enormous effort to find such islands in the solution...
Page 447 - Samuel (19606) has taken a strong position against the idea of machines thinking. His argument, based on the fact that reliable computers do only that which they are instructed to do, has a basic flaw; it does not follow that the programmer therefore has full knowledge (and therefore full responsibility and credit for) what will ensue. For certainly the programmer may set up an evolutionary system whose limitations are for him unclear and possibly incomprehensible.
Page 406 - I believe that it is; that we are on the threshold of an era that will be strongly influenced, and quite possibly dominated, by intelligent problem-solving machines. But our purpose is not to guess about what the future may bring; it is only to try to describe and explain what seem now to be our first steps toward the construction of "artificial intelligence.
Page 432 - It is extremely doubtful whether there is enough information in "win lose, or draw" when referred to the whole play of the game to permit any learning at all over available time scales.... For learning to take place, each play of the game must yield much more information. This is... achieved by breaking the problem into components. The unit of success is the goal. If a goal is achieved, its subgoals are reinforced; if not they are inhibited. (Actually, what is reinforced is the transformation rule...
Page 433 - In changing just one instruction at a time the machine had not taken large enough steps in its search through program space. The second paper goes on to discuss a sequence of modifications in the program generator and its reinforcement operators. With these, and with some "priming" (starting the machine off on the right track with some useful instructions), the system came to be only a little worse than chance. Friedberg et al. (1959) conclude that with these improvements "the generally superior...
Page 339 - Robotics The problem of controlling the physical actions of a mobile robot might not seem to require much intelligence. Even small children are able to navigate successfully through their environment and to manipulate items, such as light switches, toy blocks, eating utensils, etc. However these same tasks, performed almost unconsciously by humans, when performed by a machine require many of the same abilities used in solving more intellectually demanding problems. Research on robots or robotics...
Page 443 - C,, be the name of that method (or a list of such methods). If there is no such method the corresponding entry is null. Now suppose that there is no entry for...
Page 435 - The solution, by machine, of really complex problems will require a variety of administration facilities. During the course of solving a problem, one becomes involved with a large assembly of interrelated subproblems. From these, at each stage, a very few must be chosen for investigation. This decision must be based on 1) estimates of relative difficulties and 2) estimates of centrality of the different candidates for attention. Following subproblem selection (for which several heuristic methods...
Page 406 - Introduction A visitor to our planet might be puzzled about the role of computers in our technology. On the one hand, he would read and hear all about wonderful "mechanical brains" baffling their creators with prodigious intellectual performance. And he (or it) would be warned that these machines must be restrained, lest they overwhelm us by might, persuasion, or even by the revelation of truths too terrible to be borne. On the other hand, our visitor would find the machines being denounced, on all...
Page 418 - A,A,C, which can have more than two values. and the sequences are therefore [by definition] not significant. Let it discard these and pick some others. Sooner or later, however, some sequences will prove significant; that is, their distribution functions will peak up somewhere. What the machine does now is to build up new sequences like the significant ones. This is the important point. If it merely chose sequences at random it might take a very long while indeed to find the best sequences. But with...

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