Synopsis
When World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov lost the now-famous rematch against IBM's chess-playing computer Deep Blue last year, millions were riveted. When NASA mounted its historic mission to Mars, the world watched spellbound as a sophisticated mechanical device rolled across the surface of the red planet, taking photographs and analyzing rock samples. Consequently, these events stirred renewed speculation about one of modern science's most fascinating, and haunting, pursuits--the creation of a machine with a mind.
While the likes of HAL, the sentient, conversant computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the android "replicants" of Blade Runner have mainly kept Artificial Intelligence a purely science-fictional concept in the public eye, the quest to synthesize thought has been very much a reality for decades--and not without striking successes. From the pioneering experiments in "cybernetics" of the 1940s to the digital computers and robot prototypes developed by Carnegie Mellon University and MIT researchers to Deep Blue, and on to the most current projects involving humanoid robotics and attempts to duplicate the evolution of intelligence, Mind Matters chronicles the extraordinary journey toward a scientific breakthrough that could well overshadow man's conquest of space.
Whether such a breakthrough is even possible, and what the implications--social, economic, political--for humankind will be if it is, makes Mind Matters the scientifically and philosophically provocative read of the year. Guided by the intimate knowledge, insight, and thoughtful wit of author James P. Hogan, both the technophile and technophobe alike will find themselves enthralled by the history and mystery of man's ultimate interaction with machine.
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From the Author
Background and aims of the book.
This was my first venture into a full book-length, nonfiction project. One of the great things about life is that education never really has to end if you keep looking hard enough.
Well, actually, I didn't have to look. One day in September 1996 the phone rang, and my agent, Eleanor Wood, said, "Owen Lock [of Ballantine] wants you to do a book on AI for them." Apparently there had been a management meeting there, and somebody had proposed bringing out a popular-level coverage of the subject to coincide with the Kasparov-Deep Blue replay scheduled for May, 1997.
"Mind Matters" isn't intended as a textbook for Ph.D.s to add to their shelves--scores of excellent ones have been written already, and I'm not the person to add to them. Neither is it a history of the field-- which has also been well covered by other writers in ways that need no improvement. Rather, it's a mixture of background and techniques, with an emphasis of understanding why, but also with a historical thread--as the subtitle says, more of an amble around the world of AI, stopping to have a look at assorted things that I, personally, find of interest. Topics include:
-- From Aristotle and the medieval Scholastics to Descartes and the change in world-view that made the notion of a machine's being capable of imitating what minds do at least thinkable.
-- Charles Babbage and his design for a steam-driven mechanical computer, the "Analytical Engine," which was years ahead of its time but never built because of a combination of technical and political problems.
-- logic and the story of attempts to mechanize it; how Russell and Whitehead torpedoed Gottlob Frege when he thought he could prove all of mathematics, only to be blown out of the water themselves by Kurt G"del; Alan Turing with his machines and his Test; what set the digital computer apart from every other machine ever conceived.
-- the development of AI from the "Cybernetics" of the 40s, the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, through to the work in the 60s and 70s at places like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and IBM on such things as theorem proving, problem solving, artificial vision, robotics.
-- computer game-playing from Arthur Samuel's Checkers Player in the 50s to IBM's Deep Blue.
-- the enormous difficulties of trying to program such faculties as natural-language comprehension and common sense; why computers that are so good at the things humans find hard have so much trouble with tasks that are effortless for young children.
-- and along the way, a look at such techniques as expert systems, parallel architecture, neural nets and Boltzmann machines, data mining, genetic programming, and holographic processing.
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