Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Evaluating progress

How can one determine if an agent is intelligent? In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a general procedure to test the intelligence of an agent now known as the Turing test. This procedure allows almost all the major problems of artificial intelligence to be tested. However, it is a very difficult challenge and at present all agents fail.

Artificial intelligence can also be evaluated on specific problems such as small problems in chemistry, hand-writing recognition and game-playing. Such tests have been termed subject matter expert Turing tests. Smaller problems provide more achievable goals and there are an ever-increasing number of positive results.

The broad classes of outcome for an AI test are:

  • Optimal: it is not possible to perform better
  • Strong super-human: performs better than all humans
  • Super-human: performs better than most humans
  • Sub-human: performs worse than most humans

For example, performance at draughts is optimal, performance at chess is super-human and nearing strong super-human, and performance at many everyday tasks performed by humans is sub-human.

A quite different approach measures machine intelligence through tests which are developed from mathematical definitions of intelligence. Examples of these kinds of tests start in the late nineties devising intelligence tests using notions from Kolmogorov Complexity and data compression . Similar definitions of machine intelligence have been put forward by Marcus Hutter in his book Universal Artificial Intelligence (Springer 2005), an idea further developed by Legg and Hutter . Two major advantages of mathematical definitions are their applicability to nonhuman intelligences and their absence of a requirement for human testers.

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