BY ROBERT S. BOYD
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
October 27, 2005
WASHINGTON -- The machines are gaining on us. Their electronic brains are getting quicker and more capable and are displaying more signs of humanlike intelligence.
A race this month by five vehicles across 132 miles of twisting desert road without a living soul aboard is evidence of the remarkable progress in the arcane field of artificial intelligence -- AI for short.
Artificial intelligence is what happens when a computer or machine does something that would be considered intelligent if a human did it, such as drive a car, play soccer, reserve a hotel room or pilot a plane.
Also known as machine intelligence, AI is wired into almost every corner of modern society. AI programs design jet engines, spot bank fraud, evaluate mortgage applications, vacuum floors, organize supply systems for Wal-Mart and the Air Force and search buildings for hidden bombs or terrorists.
The wildly popular information-search system Google is, at bottom, an AI application.
"If all the AI systems in the world suddenly stopped functioning, our economic infrastructure would grind to a halt," Ray Kurzweil wrote in his new book, "The Singularity Is Near" (Viking, 2005). "Your bank would cease doing business. Most transportation would be crippled. World communications would fail."
Business and industry rely on thousands of hidden AI applications that were just research projects 10 to 15 years ago, said Kurzweil, who has invented several successful AI systems, such as speech and handwriting recognition.
"Every major drug developer is using AI programs in the development of new drug therapies," Kurzweil said.
An AI technology based on evolutionary principles -- known as genetic algorithms -- helped NASA design three satellites that will be launched in February to study magnetic fields in Earth's atmosphere.
"The AI software examined millions of potential antenna designs before settling on a final one," said Jason Lohn, lead scientist on the project at NASA's research center in Mountain View, Calif. "Through a process patterned after Darwin's survival of the fittest, the strongest designs survive and the less capable do not."
Some AI systems are famous, such as Deep Blue, the computer that beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov, or Predators, the unmanned spy planes hovering over Afghanistan.
But the machine intelligence that underlies most such systems is largely invisible, so people take the cleverness for granted. AI experts grouse that once one of their projects succeeds, people no longer consider it to be AI.
According to Rodney Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "AI is everywhere around you every second of the day. People just don't notice it."
AI was born amid great enthusiasm in the 1960s, but it soon ran into computer software and hardware problems that were too tough for the much slower, far less sophisticated technology of the day. Disillusionment set in, and the 1980s and early 1990s became known as the AI Winter.
"There was a lot of optimism about artificial intelligence in the early days. But then we hit a brick wall," said Alan Mackworth, a computer scientist who is president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
"People were embarrassed to call themselves AI researchers," Mackworth said. "Now it's coming back. We've gotten a lot better at doing the science."
Doubts remain, of course.
"We don't have truly intelligent machines yet," Marvin Minsky, a senior computer science professor at MIT, told the annual meeting of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence last summer in Pittsburgh. "Although there have been terrific achievements, such as Deep Blue beating the chess champion, there is no program that shows the resourcefulness of a 2-year-old."
Stanley, the robotic Volkswagen that won the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's race across the California desert on Oct. 9, was designed by the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
Every 30 seconds, Stanley had to integrate signals from a Global Positioning System, a camera eye and lasers to detect obstacles, and from its accelerator, brakes and wheels to navigate the rugged course.
"Stanley has a model of how gas, brake and steering inputs affect his motion," said Mike Montemerlo, one of the project leaders. "Stanley estimates his position very accurately."