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August 1998 PC USER |
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How Human
can PCs Be? No one claims that machines will come close to replicating full human emotion. But friendlier ones that can "feel" as well as "think" are on their way. By T A Balasubramanian "Human advance is determined not by reason alone but
by emotions peculiar to our species, aided and tempered by reason. What makes us people
and not computers is emotion."
Even so, there appear to be some human skills that computers as Deep Blue are still not capable of acquiring. A specific example demonstrates the difference between the human style of play and the computer style of play: the fact that chess programs exhibit a lack of understanding of the role of timing in chess. Concepts involving never, eventually, or any time can be very difficult for computer programs. For example, a weapon in the arsenal of most strong human players is the idea of a 'fortress'--a position where a player who has fewer or less-powerful pieces, can create an impenetrable position in which the opponent can never make progress. In the 1996 Kasparov-Deep Blue match, Kasparov was able to clinch a draw in the fourth game by means of a sacrifice that created a 'fortress'. Although Deep Blue can be programmed to identify many different specific 'fortresses', detecting the general case of a 'fortress' is still beyond its capabilities. Another difference between human and computer styles of play can be seen by examining a position involving the ability to reason. At the conclusion of the historic match, Kasparov is said to have visited IBM's research lab and demonstrated a position from which he was absolutely certain that Black would eventually checkmate. Kasparov could not say precisely how many moves it would take, and he was curious to see how Deep Blue would analyse the position. Even after several minutes of search, however, Deep Blue could not see the checkmate. Is HAL Possible? As we approach the 2001 horizon, the phrase "user-friendly" is about to take on a more literal meaning: computer scientists are creating machines that can recognise their users most intimate moods and respond like an empathetic friend. The idea of a machine cognisant of "emotion" can conjure more sinister images--like that of HAL, the diabolically clever and menacing computer in Arthur C. Clarke's novel "2001: A Space Odyssey," whose fear of being unplugged led him to kill all but one of the crew members on a space mission. The most absorbing technical issue associated with HAL--and the one that captures the imagination, is his artificial intelligence (AI) that includes not only reasoning, but very complex emotions as well. Why is it that we have no breakthroughs yet in AI? Marvin Minsky (a scientist who pioneered work in AI) argues that the field made such good progress in its early days that researchers became overconfident and moved on prematurely to more immediate or practical problems--for example, chess and speech-recognition. They left undone the central work of understanding the general computational principles--learning, reasoning and creativity--that underlie intelligence. Without these, he believes, we will end up with a bunch of dumb experts and will never achieve AI. Others are of the view that the missing pieces lie in the domain of complex systems--where simple elements can interact to produce unexpectedly complex behaviour. Just as the simple laws of physics applied to simple water molecules can give rise to the wonderfully complex vortex flow of a stream around a rock, so the relatively simple rules governing nerve cells (neurons) may lead to a complex cognitive system. A radical approach taken by some other researchers is that we already know how to achieve AI--just reverse engineer a brain! In a few decades, this school of thought goes, we may be able to scan an entire human brain, down to the level of nerve cells and their interconnections. We need then merely encode all that information into a computer to make a virtual brain every bit as intelligent as a human brain that is its model. However, the more conservative view today is that there is no silver bullet for achieving AI. We first need to encode an enormous amount of common-sense knowledge into a computer through a laborious process of hand entering information gleaned from a wide range of sources--such as encyclopaedias. With such a "primed knowledge pump," a computer might be able to learn more by reading books and interacting with its environment, scientists and other experts, and, perhaps, other developing computers. That, at least, is the theory which stresses the need for a computer to explore the world, and learn from its interactions. Natural Computers Scientists foresee a time when computers in automobiles will sense when drivers are getting too drowsy or impatient and so deliver wake-up messages. Tutors will notice when their pupils are getting frustrated or overwhelmed and so offer encouraging words and make lessons easier. Wearable computers would warn people with chronic conditions like severe asthma or hypertension when they are becoming too overwrought. Bits and pieces of this emotionally attuned cyber-future already exist. Computer scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, have reportedly developed a system that can recognise facial expressions of emotions like surprise and sadness. Emotions like fear, sadness, and anger each get pronounced through a unique signature of changes in facial muscle, vocal inflection, physiological arousal and other such cues. Building on techniques of pattern-recognition already used for computer comprehension of words and images, researchers here have constructed the computer system that can read people's emotions from changes in their facial expression. In another example, engineers at North-western University in Pittsburgh have designed programs that converse with people and respond appropriately to their emotions. And at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where much of the work in what is being called "affective computing" is under way, a computer worn around the waist monitors its wearer's every shift of mood. Who Wants Them? One impetus for building these more sensitive computers is widespread frustration with the stupidity of some of the present models. MIT's Media Lab has reportedly designed prototypes of precisely such sensitive machines that are not just portable, but wearable, too. A computer that monitors your emotions might be worn on your shoulders, waist, in your shoes, anywhere. It could sense from your muscle tension, or the lightness of your step, how you are feeling, and alert you if, say you're getting too stressed. Or share that information with other people you know, like your doctor or your spouse. We may be getting closer than ever to "almost human" computers that can now pass the test proposed by British computer scientist Alan Turing in a 1950. The "Turing Test" postulates that if an interrogator, communicating only by keyboard with two hidden entities (one a person and the other a computer) cannot make out which is which, then the computer can be said to "think". Perhaps we would still have to wait at least until 2001 to discover whether or not HAL can come to life with "feeling" as well as "thinking"! T.A. Balasubramanian former senior manager (systems), Hindustan Petroleum Corp. Ltd., Mumbai |
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There was a lot of rejoicing at IBM when Deep Blue became the world's first
non-human chess grandmaster. There was much talk about how machine intelligence is going
to overtake human intelligence in the next decade. 
From the most recent reports about new computers on the anvil, human
intelligence is not the only area being encroached upon by the ubiquitous march of silicon
technology. If these reports are to be believed, the most startling progress has come in
creating machines that can read human emotion, a challenge similar to having them
recognise handwritten words or speech. 
