Artificial Intelligence Essay

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“Artificial Intelligence And America”       Artificial Intelligence played a crucial role in our American history and the history of the world. Some view it as the vain pursuit of man to become god-like and create life, others, as the next logical step in computer technology. However, the conclusion is not nearly the most important part of it. The process of the pursuit of the creation of mechanical sentient life has also led to a much deeper understanding of how our own biological minds work, creating new methods to treat brain diseases, and other brain related disorders. Through this, life is longer sustained, but modern life itself would not exist without some AI programs today. Several AI programs control …show more content…

Researchers believe the brain works the same way, but with chemicals and proteins instead of electricity. “The brain is a electrical and chemical mechanism, whose evolution is barely understood, whose organization is enormously complex, and which produces complex behavior in response to an even more complex environment.” (Pamela McCord, Machines Who Think, p. 70) The human brain is the most complex thing on this planet, without question. Not only because of it’s methods of transferring and recalling information, but its incredible ability of abstraction, prediction, learning, adaptation, and guessing. Aristotle suggested that thoughts could be classified into three categories: intelligence, logic, and algebra. However, this is flawed because irrationality can also influence …show more content…

Deep Blue is an example of a powerful chess engine programmed to not be perfect, but to act out the most logical moves within an allotted time. The earliest form of a completed publicly recognized AI program was checkers created by Arthur Samuel, working for IBM. This was only a side job for him, but it became an embarrassment to himself and his company when he completed it because checkers was regarded as a trivial time waster. He built the engine on the basic principals of checkers, leaving out his own experience, to let the computer decide moves for itself. He also programmed the engine to have the ability to learn from its mistakes. In 1961 the checkers program played on the masters level by simply looking ahead, evaluating, and incorporating the knowledge it received from previous mistakes. Chess was being worked on far before the Samuel’s checkers program was, but none were finished until after Alex Bernstein developed an engine that was capable of beating Level C chess players. Shortly after, two programmers from Northwestern University, David Slate and Larry Atkin, developed a chess-playing engine, which was capable of beating Level B players. This engine didn't incorporate any new logic, just faster processing speeds making deeper thinking possible. Unfortunately, these AI programs did very little to give insight into how the human brain works. Brilliant people can do very poorly at chess, while at the same time

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