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A.M. Andrew:
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: A Russian translation of this paper (#VadimStefanuk) has appeared in AI News, issue no. 2 for 1999 (though appearing in 2000), a special issue to mark the 60th birthday, on July 13, 1999, of Professor Vadim L. Stefanuk of the Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Science. AI News is published by the Russian Association for Artifical Intelligence (RAAI). Other papers in the issue are to include one by Professor Stefanuk on "discovery" as well as one from a Russian author on the origins of mathematics, one from Japan on ontology, and a page of poetry.
What is AI?
A "festschrift" for Vadim Stefanuk is an appropriate place to take a fresh look at some fundamental aspects of artificial intelligence. For a start, it is interesting to consider just what the term implies. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is usually defined by some such phrase as: "the area of study aimed at making machines perform in ways that would be accepted as intelligent if done by a person". This seems perfectly clear at first sight, but a little reflection shows that it does not cover everything that is meant when reference is made to "artificial intelligence".
There is no universally-agreed definition of "intelligence", and it has been remarked that in the context of some discussions by educational psychologists the only consistent definition is as: "whatever it is that intelligence tests measure". Most people have an individual intuitive view of what counts as "intelligence", probably unconsciously formulated to ensure that the person concerned appears to possess the quality in good measure.
We also have intuitive ideas about the kind of mechanism that should be responsible for intelligent behaviour, whether shown by animal or machine. For example, a machine (probably implemented as a computer program) to play a simple board game such as noughts-and-crosses (or, in America, tic-tac-toe) can operate simply by looking up a table in which appropriate moves are listed against all possible situations that can arise. For this particular game the table needed to specify a playing strategy would occupy an amount of storage that would pose no problem in a modern computer. (The game is played on a grid of nine cells, each of which can be...