PhiloComp.net

Artificial Intelligence

This section has a limited focus on tools for education about Artificial Intelligence (especially those directed towards students with philosophical interests), brief discussion of fundamental questions about the very possibility of genuine machine intelligence (including the Turing Test and Chinese Room thought-experiments), and one page each on two areas of particular relevance here, on Automated Reasoning and Natural Language Processing.

The recent fast progress in AI has naturally attracted great interest from philosophers. Up-to-date references can be found through the following links, which are copied from the "Philosophy of AI" section in the page on Meta-Studies of Computing and Information:

Other links may be found on the same page, indexed under the following headings: Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Artificial Life, Philosophy of Computation, and Philosophy of Information.

Learning about Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is now a vast field, encompassing a wide range of topics. A sense of this range can be gleaned by scanning the contents of the leading AI textbook, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig (which runs to over 1,000 pages). For a far more manageable and engaging guide to AI and its history, see Mike Wooldridge's The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI.

Most of the recent fuss about AI has come from conspicuous successes in the area of Machine Learning. A gentle introduction to some of the basic ideas is provided by Machine Learning for Kids. That site also maintains a useful list of Educational AI resources for children.

This site is the home of the Elizabeth educational chatterbot, an automated conversation program designed to provide an enjoyable and easy introduction to natural language processing, and also to give insight on the plausibility of the Turing Test and Chinese Room thought-experiments. The system has sufficient power to permit the handling of complex grammatical transformations and resolution theorem-proving, and is packaged with self-teaching materials designed for the non-specialist.