+
+ What is intelligence? Various explanations and definitions
+ have been put forward by different researchers.
+ Intelligence has been defined, among many other proposals,
+ as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge, and as the capacity
+ for logical reasoning and self-awareness. It has been related to
+ understanding, solving, planning, and several other concepts and
+ tasks. It has been categorized into different kinds of
+ intelligence, such as emotional intelligence, social
+ intelligence and so on.
+
+
+
+
+ The word stems from the Latin verb intellego "I understand,
+ realize, perceive, see, notice" (among other meanings),
+ from lego "I gather, collect, take, read" (among other meanings).
+
+
+
+ Since no generally accepted definition of intelligence is
+ available, it is even harder to define what artificial
+ intelligence is. Broadly speaking, we can distinguish
+ two different categories of artificial intelligence (AI):
+
+
+
strong AI: This means a mechanism whose intellectual
+ ability is indistinguishable from that of a human.
+
+
weak AI: This means a mechanism that automates a
+ subset of human abilities.
+
+
+
+ So far, we have seen a lot of progress in weak AI. For
+ example, machines have been built that
+ play chess, Go,
+ Jeopardy
+ and many other games even better than the most able humans. Many
+ of us are routinely using partially self-driving trains and
+ subways, and we currently witness the first attempts at
+ self-driving cars.
+
+
In contrast, strong AI has remained out of reach.
+ In fact, it has
+ been argued,
+ and further argued,
+ that strong AI is inherently impossible to implement.
+
+
Approaches
+
+ Broadly speaking, we distinguish two possible approaches
+ towards implementing AI:
+
+
+
+
+
+ Both approaches have been widely known among researchers, and have
+ also been used in practice, for many decades. Prolog is frequently
+ associated with symbolic approaches. Well-known
+ applications of this kind
+ are Wumpus World, Escape
+ from Zurg and Connect 4.
+ Prolog can of course also implement statistical approaches. For
+ example, check
+ out ProbLog,
+ cplint
+ and AILog 2
+ for probabilistic logic programming and reasoning with
+ uncertainties.
+
+
+
+ The approaches have different advantages and drawbacks: A symbolic
+ approach is typically amenable to formal verification. The
+ rules are explicitly available, and you can check whether they are
+ complete, and whether they express what you intend.
+ Using inductive logic programming (ILP), you can even let a
+ program learn rules based on positive and negative
+ examples. See for example
+ the Metagol
+ system. However, not all tasks are amenable to symbolic
+ approaches, because the rules may be too hard to express.
+ For example, it is hard to express rules that determine whether a
+ musical piece is borderline atonal, or whether a photo
+ contains a painting of a flower.
+
+
+
+ On the other hand, statistical approaches have the ability to
+ acquire rules implicitly, based on
+ so-called training-, test-
+ and validation sets. This is convenient, because you
+ do not have to think about the rules yourself, and the machine may
+ derive rules that are too hard for you to encode. Unfortunately,
+ this also comes with significant drawbacks: You can no longer
+ reason about the rules explicitly, and the obtained mechanism may
+ produce colossal outliers that are hard to remedy. For example, it
+ may misclassify the picture of a penguin as a car if you change a
+ single pixel.
+
+
Prolog and AI
+
+ Prolog has very strong historic ties with AI. In 1982, Japan
+ started a very ambitious government project called the Fifth
+ Generation Computer System (FGCS) with the goal to create
+ a massively parallel computer, using concurrent
+ logic programming as the software foundation of the
+ project.
+
+
+
+ When I visited Japan, I asked a retired Japanese scientist who had
+ worked on the project why the project had failed. He said: "What
+ do you mean, 'failed'? All my colleagues who have worked on
+ the project went on to become professors!" Another
+ researcher told me that the project achieved what was actually
+ intended: a way to input Japanese characters into computers.
+
+
+
+ In my view, a major achievement of the scientists who had worked
+ on this project was that they managed to convince the government
+ to fund an interesting and very ambitious project with
+ large sums.
+
+
+
+ By the end of the FGCS project, commodity hardware had become so
+ powerful that custom-built machines as those constructed by the
+ project were hardly needed anymore.
+
+
+
+ Now, several decades later, is it not time
+ to try again? Is it not time to convince our
+ governments and funding agencies that we want to benefit from the
+ power of Prolog to build applications, and do interesting
+ research?
+
+
+
+ Here are a few ideas:
+
+
+
Write a chatbot that answers questions to the administration.
+
Write an application that guides students through solving
+ tasks, so that it can be used in computer-aided education. See RITS for an example.
+
Find a way to formalize legislation, so that
+ questions about laws can be automatically answered. For an
+ example, check out a Prolog formulation of
+ the constitution
+ of Japan,
+ and Reasoning
+ with Regulations as instances
+ of smart contracts.
+