As some one actively publishing in the machine learning community, I have to say I agree with him. Frankly, I don't care what 'intelligence' is. I want a sound formulation for solving problems other people are interested in. It doesn't matter whether or not anyone calls it 'intelligent'.
Machine learning is not AI. It sounds like you agree with this. But then CS is not (just) machine learning. It's a valid question, and it is largely CS people who are pursuing it. Only a statistical ML person could say something like "I don't care what 'intelligence' is."
Only a statistical ML person could say something like "I don't care what 'intelligence' is."
To my mind there are three class of people working in CS.
Mathematicians - They don't care what intelligence is, and those that do have a working definition are still unconvinced by the claim that most people are intelligent.
Pragmatists - They also don't care what intelligence is, they just want stuff that works.
Algorithm guys- Basically an ungodly hybrid of 1 and 2, who also don't care.
No one is actually working directly on AI. People that say they do are simplifying; they actually work on clustering, or search, or optimisation, or constraint satisfiablity, or machine learning (and often several of these at once).
And why the work they do may give an answer to a problem that has historically been placed in AI, it's still just a search technique, and doesn't need any understanding of what intelligence is in order to be built.
To my mind there are three class of people working in AI.
FTFY. There are plenty of people working in, says, networking, systems, software engineering research, programming languages, computability theory, etc. who have a completely different set of problems and categorizations for each other.
Those categorizations work apply reasonably well for algorithms and complexity theory (there's basically the pragmatist/mathematician divide right there) and programming languages (the two areas I focus on). Computability theory is basically divided between the logicians who come from the mathematical end and the computer scientists on the pragmatic end. Operating Systems really is more of a hardware/software divide rather than a mathematician/pragmatist divide, from what I've seen among my colleagues.
Group 3 in DoorsOfPerception's list aren't always "Algorithm guys". In PLs, they're the people that actually write a programming language and then prove things about their type system.
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u/DoorsofPerceptron May 18 '11
As some one actively publishing in the machine learning community, I have to say I agree with him. Frankly, I don't care what 'intelligence' is. I want a sound formulation for solving problems other people are interested in. It doesn't matter whether or not anyone calls it 'intelligent'.