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Computing failsComputing failsPosted Oct 17, 2012 17:44 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)In reply to: Plasma Active Three released by bronson Parent article: Plasma Active Three released
I'm not sure I can think of an area of computing that has seen such reliable, abject failure.Come on, try a bit harder. Intelligent agents (supposed to bid for you on eBay)? Mobile agents (supposed to migrate from one machine to the next)? Neural networks? Ontologies? e-Learning? Meta-programming (programs that programmed other programs? Expert systems? Fuzzy logic? The whole artificial intelligence thing? Quantum computing? The semantic web isn't even the worst offender IMHO... although it has been pretty long-lived by now.
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Computing fails Posted Oct 17, 2012 18:49 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
"Intelligent agents (supposed to bid for you on eBay)? Mobile agents (supposed to migrate from one machine to the next)? Ontologies?"
I used to work on the Agent Development Kit when I was with Tryllian around 2000... Intelligent, mobile agents with shared ontologies! And a total turnover for the 100+ company until it went broke of 10k euros. Tryllian even bought its own 4-floor office building before the ex-xerox salesperson had ever sold a single license. Every year those licenses got more expensive, to cover the development investment. But I really learned a lot about coding at Tryllian.
Computing fails Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:23 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Mobile agents are not yet there.
Neural networks are widely used in things like text and speech recognition (they are not all that they were hyped up to be, but they are still useful).
Ontologies are dead - they're semantic computing thingy, duh.
Expert systems, fuzzy logic and AI are used more and more: just check those Kinect sensors or Google's self-driving cars.
I'm sure, we can find even more dismal areas than semantic computing, but it's not an easy task :)
Computing fails Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:31 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
I've worked on mobile agents for five or six years and I learned two things: to code really well and that mobile agents are snake oil. There's nothing a mobile agent can do that rpc can't do.
Computing fails Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:34 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Well, there is one thing mobile agents can do much better than RPC: expose your machine to potentially malicious code and perhaps even infect it.
Computing fails Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:41 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
Yeah... That's one thing that made it a tough sell to one of the larger Dutch banks who needed a kind of remote monitoring system for basel-N compliance.
Computing fails Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:50 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I don't think a self-driving car would qualify as "Artificial Intelligence" as it was understood 20 or 30 years ago. Sure, there are very clever algorithms involved, but there is no learning involved by the part of the machine. Do you think the robot will adapt to driving in e.g. snowy roads unless the algorithms have been programmed to deal with it? It is just that we (meaning Google engineers) have got much better at developing adaptive algorithms.Compare with the Turing test: impersonating a real human in a conversation. I don't think Wolfram Alpha qualifies, even though I have had many conversations more boring than a single search in the Alpha engine.
Computing fails Posted Oct 17, 2012 20:14 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] I expect a self-driving car would have indeed been seen as AI, just like chess playing was. Remember one of the central tenets of AI, as I learned in my AI courses so many years ago: once we get something working and understand how to solve the problem, it's not AI anymore...
Computing fails Posted Oct 17, 2012 21:15 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
> Do you think the robot will adapt to driving in e.g. snowy roads unless the algorithms have been programmed to deal with it?
Yes.
Google's self driving cars are programmed with a mix of clever algorithms, classical AI algorithms and new machine learning techniques. All put together leads to some surprising results on the tests.
I had the opportunity to take Thrun and Norvig's course on AI (www.ai-class.com), and I can say that the field has advanced more in the latest 5 years alone than in the previous 30. It's well worth the effort:
Computing fails Posted Oct 17, 2012 20:54 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
Most of these things
> Intelligent agents (supposed to bid for you on eBay)?
They exist (not smart, but they exist), so I guess it depends on your definition of 'Intelligent'. Some definitions make this part of the AI question.
still being promised and worked on. showing up more commonly in movies and TV shows (especially the high-tech crime dramas). probably going to arrive relatively soon for a small subset of things to move apps between mobile devices and more powerful permanent devices.
Once you get the ability to run Android apps on Linux desktop systems you have all the pieces in place. The apps checkpoint themselves so that they can be stopped and restarted, so stopping an app on a mobile device and restarting it on a desktop device should be straightforward
> Neural networks?
Very common, just not highly visible.
> e-Learning?
Very common, just not in schools (it's how a lot of technical training takes place nowdays
> Meta-programming (programs that programmed other programs?
it exists, but as a niche
> Expert systems? Fuzzy logic?
both of these are extremely common, you probably just don't recognize them when you bump into them.
Expert systems dominate tech support systems for example.
Computing fails Posted Oct 17, 2012 21:03 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
oops published too quickly.
I meant to say that most of the things you are talking about are acutlaly fairly common, you just don't know what's happening under the covers.
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