Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents

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T-720-ATAI-2016

Intelligence	This course is about phenomenon we refer to as “intelligence”. A number of features of natural intelligence remain unexplained.
AGI	A number of terms have been used to refer to the various aspects that people study wrt intelligence. We use the term “artificial general intelligence” in the most general sense (no pun intended), to refer to the various aspects of intelligence that allows it to deal with variety, incompleteness, and incremental information gathering.
Advanced topics	The main focus of course is not the latest and greatest methods to come out of the field called “AI”. However, we will make some references to such methods along the way, and you may even learn something about them. But that is not what is meant by “advanced”.
What does “advanced” mean here?	It refers to advancement toward a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of intelligence.
History	The phenomenon of intelligence has been studied for ages. Some of the early notable contributions were the Greek philosophers' musings on reasoning and logic. This is not a history course, but we must make some references to the history of philosophy, AI, cybernetics and computer science along the way.

Lectures	Every week involves lectures. Listening is good. Listening and asking questions is better. Reading the assignments, listening, and asking questions is best.
Programming assignments	To enable you to get insight into principles of machine learning.
Short Essay	To allow you to delve into a topic of particular interest to you.
Programming Project	To give you a bit more in-depth experience in programming AGI systems.
Final Exam	To try to gauge how much of the material you actually understand – how much of it you have “ingested”.

Isn't AI almost solved?	Short answer: No! If it's almost solved it's been almost solved for 60 years.
Should we fear AI?	Short answer: No! Long answer: The threat lies with humans, not with machines – human abuse of knowledge goes back to the stone age.
Is the Singularity near?	Short answer: Who knows?

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Intelligence	Intelligence is a natural phenomenon.
Natural Intelligence	Many animals are considered “intelligent”.
Artificial Intelligence	Systems created by us to display (some or all) features deemed 'intelligent' when encountered in nature. Many definitions, see e.g.: .
Definitions	We must be careful when it comes to definitions – for any complex system there is a world of difference between decent definitions and good, accurate and appropriate definitions.
Aaron Sloman	“Some readers may hope for definitions of terms like information processing, mental process, consciousness, emotion, love. However, each of these denotes a large and ill-defined collection of capabilities or features. There is no definite collection of nec- essary or sufficient conditions (nor any disjunction of conjunctions) that can be used to define such terms.” (From Architectural Requirements for Human-like Agents Both Natural and Artificial by A. Sloman)