Re: [FT] Unpredictable AI

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On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Richard and Emily Bell wrote:

> A large database is its own worst enemy when you have to spot things
quickly.
> Flying a fighter is a hard real time problem, so the AI better have a
good
> response for unidentified things.  Computers are really, really bad at
> recognizing things quickly, and it will take an improvement of several
orders of
> magnitude before they are as good as humans.	For short response
times, a large
> group of neural networks will attack the problem, and hopefully
provide a
> correct response.  Unfortunately, it will recognize stimuli as what it
most
> likely is, not what it really is (but the two will coincide, more
often than
> not), and unfamiliar things will be recognised as familiar things.  I
admit that
> I have not tried this, but I suspect that a neural network designed to
read
> chinese characters will return a chinese character when presented with
an
> elephant, but will report a low level of confidence, if equipped to do
so.  A
> computer that scans a database for a similar chinese character to the
input will
> recognise an elephant as not a chinese character.

an interesting example is the DARPA project (I think) for armour
recognition. Having fed the system with many pictures of bad-guy armour
and good-guy armour, and flagging each as good or bad-guy, the system
could flawlessly distinguish within this set. 

Then, new pictures were fed, and the system messed up completely. Turned
out it had figured a flawless differentiation algorythm. All the bad guy
armour in the first set had been fotographed in the late afternoon,
whereas the good-guy armour had been fotographed around noon. So, the
easiest differentiation mechanism was by analysing the shadows. Sun
overhead -> good guy. Sun low -> bad guy.

Now, I'm sure I messed up some detail with respect to the original
story,
but that's pretty much what it amounted to.

Cheers,

   Derk
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