A Weblog

Artificial Intelligence: wats te fuss abt it?
It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.


Relevance of AI (within past 24 hrs):
Instance #1:
After two weeks of unrestricted access to the internet back home, tis Cyberoam thing is driving me crazy in my room. Tis is wat cyberoam is all about:
"Cyberoam is the only solution that gives you the benefit of dealing with your Internet problems through a single installation. That translates to ease-of-use. A must-have solution to create and enforce efficient Internet Management Policies"
In layman's termz, its a s/w tat blocks websites based upon its content and helps in managing internet traffic.Te product seems to b a conspiracy against Firefox (read:*****soft corp & co. ). Most of the websites gets blocked for no reason at all in Mozilla Firefox browser alone. Wats wrong wit viewing orkut.com?More so if te same is not restricted in Internet Explorer?? The same also occurs wit many other sites especially those of Google. Another major complaint is tat any link wit cricket gets banned n te request is logged on to a central server. But herez te catch: cricinfo.com can b viewed unhindered! Tis site is like the Bible of Cricket on te net. Seems the restriction on cricket was to prevent employees of s/w companies from keeping a tab on scores. The person who designed tis product must have been quite a dumbass. How come cricinfo.com missed his/her eye I dunno. The students though have fun wit tis Cyberoam when one found out tat our exam timetable cud not be viewed since it was classifed as pornography by Cyberoam!!!The only time we agreed with its behaviour i think [;-)]!!!!

Instance #2:
Had our first class on AI today morning. Sir started te slide show wit some intro quotes n a take on Turing. Rewind to ma third sem when I was very much interested in Turing.Te whole of me was bristling wit excitement as if i am gonna b te nxt Alan Turing! Spent a lot of time on te net researchin abt him(not wat he did ;-) ). As te year went on I lost all my interest n realised tat I wud b yet another s/w engineer cursing wateva hes doin.
Titbit: Turing Prize given annually is considered as Nobel Prize for Computer Science.

Instance #3:
Read in BBC tat some researchers from the Univ of Amsterdam hav found out tat Leo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa was mainly happy when she was painted using emotion recognition s/w(another instance of AI). It concluded tat te subject was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry.(Hmm..these guyz should help out the Cyberoam gang i guess)

Instance #4:
Reputation is more a social notion of trust. In our lives, we each maintain a set of reputations for people we know. When we need to work with a new, unknown person, we can ask people with whom we already have relationships for information about that person. Based on the information we gather, we form an opinion about the reputation of the new person. This system works well, even though there are a lot of people in the world, because communities tend to be highly interconnected, and the number of steps between any two people tends to be rather small. This is known as the Small World effect, and it has been shown to be true for a variety of social and web-based systems. Best eg: orkut.com!

AI has come a long way since Bill Bulko quoted: "Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones in movies." AI is penetrating our life in every way possible. Don wanna sound frankestenian. However one must remember, "A computer's attention span is only as long as its power cord."Instead of trying to replace human activities by things like AI, it wud b better off as a supplementary force(wanted a happy ending..cheers!!! :-) )