Intelligence and the Future

  • Intelligence is partly about "thinking ahead"

  • A complicated problem is solved a piece at a time, or an action at a time. Steps interact

  • Looking ahead gets complicated fast

  • AI has spent a long time thinking about this problem, and has found some fairly fancy techniques

  • Ultimately P ≠ NP (probably), so must abstract or approximate

Computers Search Good

  • A computer can construct future states from current states quickly and perfectly

  • Humans are bad at this; "easy" AI might want to leverage this

  • Problems like route-finding, scheduling, planning, puzzle-solving, games, robotics have gone there

  • Pattern-matching, machine learning, etc can be augmented with search

State Spaces

  • A state is a situation. It is static in time

  • A state space is a graph of situations.

  • The neighbors of a state s in a state space are the graph edges — states that can be reached from s by some atomic action

Road Maps and State Spaces

  • In a fancy road map, the states are junctions on the map. The state space is literally the graph of roads and junctions

  • An AI could proceed heuristically toward the goal by always choosing the route that gets closer to it

  • Dead-ends and side-trips are a big problem, though

Search The Map

  • To find a short route, it's probably better to look at least a little ahead: traverse the graph a bit and see where you end up

  • Watch out for backtracking and loops: use a stop list

  • Ultimately, this is BFS / DFS / Dijkstra search

  • Problem is usually boring for modern computers

Last modified: Tuesday, 6 October 2020, 10:04 AM