Is AI a possibility

In one of my previous post I discussed whether the World is Ready for AI? Today I was reading this post with after a long time (more than 2 yrs) and asked myself this question whether we have made enough advancements in the comupting to make AI possible in near future. We have had faster computers, greater RAM and storage available on our laptops over last two years but we are still far from having the computing framework that can support AI.

The basic of computing is a bit that has two states 0 and 1. What it translates to is the computer always has a state of certainty ie whether it has something or it does not have. On a contrary our normal intelligence works on few more states. We operate on 3 states.

1. We know that we know.
2. We know that we don't know
3. We don't know that we don't know.

This third state of ours is what makes us intelligent and gives us the power to reason given a situation. Human intelligence operates mostly out of this 3rd state of mind. The moment we know about anything that falls in 3rd stage it moves to either 1st or 2nd category.

Our brain operates in a 3-dimensional space and that's what provides us the flexibility to process similar data differently. But on the contrary computers operate in a linear space and that limits the processing capability of the computers. A simple example is for computer a glass of water is a glass of water no matter how many times we feed this data in, but for humans the first glass of water is life saver (if we are thirsty) but the same is not true with the 30th glass of water if it is drunk in succession. The 30th glass may become a burden to drink. So the same data is interpreted differently here in case of humans.

What we may require is to think about the fundamental aspect on which our computing is based at. The basis of computing is 0 and 1, but we may need to think about a state where the computer can be in May Be state ie somewhere in transition. Once we have this third bit discovered and our machines are based on that, we may be able to feed consciousness and that will lead to natural intelligence in computer.

Until Next Time.

Object Structures and Descriptions

While reasoning an object we often fall into a trap of thinking about the attributes and methods of the object (in a typical Object Oriented way). But reasoning about an object goes beyond the attributes and methods. While reasoning an object we need to consider the following:

1. Object fall into categories. eg. My car is a Hatchback. My Pet is doberman. etc But then we also have instances where an object is part of multiple categories like I am an Employee, Blogger and a Husband.
2. Categories can be more general or more specific in nature eg. Physician and Surgeons are types of Doctors, A Father is a parent etc.
3. In addition to generalization being common for categories with simple names, it is also natural for those with more complex description. A Contract employee is an employee. A family with at least one child is not childless etc.
4. Object have parts and these parts have multiplicity of 1 or more. Books have Title, Humans have 2 arms, Cars have 4 wheels etc.
5. The relationship among an object's parts is essential to its being considered a member of the category. A pile of book is not same as catalog of book.
   

These are few things we need consider while deriving a framework for knowledge representation. Then there are additional complexities added to it as if the same word is used as noun or pronoun. He is Helium or He refers to another person depends on the context where the word is used.

Until Next Time....