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A comment on Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start. Parent comment

Re:Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start by j4mie on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @08:56AM (#1982919)
Why are genetic algorithms included? They are just a tool to explore multidimensional search spaces, and have nothing to do with AI unless they happen to be applied to an AI problem.

It would be nice if this was separated out into "old-fashioned" AI (data mining, statistical inference, machine learning, etc) and bio-inspired technologies (genetic algorithms, cellular automata, neural networks - although the latter may be a grey area).

Alternatively, a better name than "Artificial Intelligence" should have been used for the site. Probably too late now though..

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Re:Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start by iskander on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @01:32PM (#1983996)
"old-fashioned AI" is usually a term reserved for symbolic techniques fashionable in the 60s, 70s, 80s. Learning and data-oriented techniques are mostly the new kids on the block (for Computer Scientists at least-- stats people have been at this game all along).

As for bio-inspired techniques-- why should their point of inspiration be anything but a footnote? Genetic algorithms are just one instance of a stochastic search algorithm (there are many others), cellular automata can be pretty much anything, and so can neural networks (depending on whether you include the dozens of models more esoteric than multilayer perceptrons).

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Re:Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start by brendano on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @10:22AM (#1983169)
The definition in the Russell and Norvig textbook is nice: "computational rationality"
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Re:Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start by khafra on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @11:25AM (#1983456)
...but given the widely-accepted computational theory of mind, humans are artificial intelligences too.
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Re:Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start by dhs on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @01:34PM (#1984006)
Excuse me, but I'd really like to see your evidence of how the computational theory of mind is "widely accepted".
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Re:Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start by khafra on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @02:12PM (#1984178)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind

> This view is common in modern cognitive psychology and is presumed by theorists of evolutionary psychology.

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Re:Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start by iskander on Friday December 10, 2010 @02:47PM (#1992882)
> common in modern cognitive psychology

Only among a small besieged minority-- the majority have moved on to neurocognitive research.

>and is presumed by theorists of evolutionary psychology

That's just straight-up wrong. Perhaps there's some theorist who buys into it, but it's certainly not common.

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Re:Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start by knithx on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @09:03AM (#1982935)
Actually you can include genetic algorithms into the Artificial Intelligence when your fitness-function applied to individuals gets a little bit "intelligent" (heuristics, neural networks...)
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Re:Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start by j4mie on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @09:06AM (#1982940)
Of course - but one of the on-topic example questions is "How can I avoid premature convergence to a local optima on my genetic algorithm?". That has nothing to do with AI.
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Re:Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start by lkozma on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @09:33AM (#1983016)
I agree, that way they could have included "traditional" local optimization as well, although probably that will come up in machine learning questions anyway.
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Re:Artificial Intelligence Stack Overflow about to start by endtime on Wednesday December 08, 2010 @11:07AM (#1983375)
Just about every Intro to AI course ever teaches heuristic search. GA are a type of heuristic search.
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