Showing posts with label Herbert A Simon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Herbert A Simon. Show all posts

AI - Symbol Manipulation.

 



The broad information-processing skills of a digital stored program computer are referred to as symbol manipulation.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, seeing the computer as fundamentally a symbol manipulator became the norm, leading to the scientific study of symbolic artificial intelligence, now known as Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI).

In the 1960s, the emergence of stored-program computers sparked a renewed interest in a computer's programming flexibility.

Symbol manipulation became a comprehensive theory of intelligent behavior as well as a research guideline for AI.

The Logic Theorist, created by Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, and Cliff Shaw in 1956, was one of the first computer programs to mimic intelligent symbol manipulation.

The Logic Theorist was able to prove theorems from Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica (1910–1913) and Alfred North Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (1910–1913).

It was presented at Dartmouth's Artificial Intelligence Summer Research Project in 1956. (the Dartmouth Conference).


John McCarthy, a Dartmouth mathematics professor who invented the phrase "artificial intelligence," convened this symposium.


The Dartmouth Conference might be dubbed the genesis of AI since it was there that the Logic Theorist first appeared, and many of the participants went on to become pioneering AI researchers.

The features of symbol manipulation, as a generic process that underpins all types of intelligent problem-solving behavior, were thoroughly explicated and provided a foundation for most of the early work in AI only in the early 1960s, when Simon and Newell had built their General Problem Solver (GPS).

In 1961, Simon and Newell took their knowledge of AI and their work on GPS to a wider audience.


"A computer is not a number-manipulating device; it is a symbol-manipulating device," they wrote in Science, "and the symbols it manipulates may represent numbers, letters, phrases, or even nonnumerical, nonverbal patterns" (Newell and Simon 1961, 2012).





Reading "symbols or patterns presented by appropriate input devices, storing symbols in memory, copying symbols from one memory location to another, erasing symbols, comparing symbols for identity, detecting specific differences between their patterns, and behaving in a manner conditional on the results of its processes," Simon and Newell continued (Newell and Simon 1961, 2012).


The growth of symbol manipulation in the 1960s was also influenced by breakthroughs in cognitive psychology and symbolic logic prior to WWII.


Starting in the 1930s, experimental psychologists like Edwin Boring at Harvard University began to advance their profession away from philosophical and behavioralist methods.





Boring challenged his colleagues to break the mind open and create testable explanations for diverse cognitive mental operations (an approach that was adopted by Kenneth Colby in his work on PARRY in the 1960s).

Simon and Newell also emphasized their debt to pre-World War II developments in formal logic and abstract mathematics in their historical addendum to Human Problem Solving—not because all thought is logical or follows the rules of deductive logic, but because formal logic treated symbols as tangible objects.

"The formalization of logic proved that symbols can be copied, compared, rearranged, and concatenated with just as much definiteness of procedure as [wooden] boards can be sawed, planed, measured, and glued [in a carpenter shop]," Simon and Newell noted (Newell and Simon 1973, 877).



~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram


You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.



See also: 


Expert Systems; Newell, Allen; PARRY; Simon, Herbert A.


References & Further Reading:


Boring, Edwin G. 1946. “Mind and Mechanism.” American Journal of Psychology 59, no. 2 (April): 173–92.

Feigenbaum, Edward A., and Julian Feldman. 1963. Computers and Thought. New York: McGraw-Hill.

McCorduck, Pamela. 1979. Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company

Newell, Allen, and Herbert A. Simon. 1961. “Computer Simulation of Human Thinking.” Science 134, no. 3495 (December 22): 2011–17.

Newell, Allen, and Herbert A. Simon. 1972. Human Problem Solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Schank, Roger, and Kenneth Colby, eds. 1973. Computer Models of Thought and Language. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company.


Artificial Intelligence - What Is The Dartmouth AI Conference?

      



    The Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence, officially known as the "Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence," was held in 1956 and is frequently referred to as the AI Constitution.


    • The multidisciplinary conference, held on the Dartmouth College campus in Hanover, New Hampshire, brought together specialists in cybernetics, automata and information theory, operations research, and game theory.
    • Claude Shannon (the "father of information theory"), Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Herbert Simon, Allen Newell ("founding fathers of artificial intelligence"), and Nathaniel Rochester (architect of IBM's first commercial scientific mainframe computer) were among the more than twenty attendees.
    • Participants came from the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Bell Laboratories, and the RAND Systems Research Laboratory.




    The Rockefeller Foundation provided a substantial portion of the funding for the Dartmouth Conference.



    The Dartmouth Conference, which lasted around two months, was envisaged by the organizers as a method to make quick progress on computer models of human cognition.


    • "Every facet of learning or any other trait of intelligence may in theory be so clearly characterized that a computer can be constructed to replicate it," organizers said as a starting point for their deliberations (McCarthy 1955, 2).



    • In his Rockefeller Foundation proposal a year before to the summer meeting, mathematician and principal organizer John McCarthy created the phrase "artificial intelligence." McCarthy subsequently said that the new name was intended to establish a barrier between his study and the discipline of cybernetics.
    • He was a driving force behind the development of symbol processing techniques to artificial intelligence, which were at the time in the minority.
    • In the 1950s, analog cybernetic techniques and neural networks were the most common brain modeling methodologies.




    Issues Covered At The Conference.



    The Dartmouth Conference included a broad variety of issues, from complexity theory and neuron nets to creative thinking and unpredictability.


    • The conference is notable for being the site of the first public demonstration of Newell, Simon, and Clifford Shaw's Logic Theorist, a program that could independently verify theorems stated in Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's Principia Mathematica.
    • The only program at the conference that tried to imitate the logical features of human intellect was Logic Theorist.
    • Attendees predicted that by 1970, digital computers would have become chess grandmasters, discovered new and important mathematical theorems, produced passable language translations and understood spoken language, and composed classical music.
    • Because the Rockefeller Foundation never received a formal report on the conference, the majority of information on the events comes from memories, handwritten notes, and a few papers authored by participants and published elsewhere.



    Mechanization of Thought Processes


    Following the Dartmouth Conference, the British National Physical Laboratory (NPL) hosted an international conference on "Mechanization of Thought Processes" in 1958.


    • Several Dartmouth Conference attendees, including Minsky and McCarthy, spoke at the NPL conference.
    • Minsky mentioned the Dartmouth Conference's relevance in the creation of his heuristic software for solving plane geometry issues and the switch from analog feedback, neural networks, and brain modeling to symbolic AI techniques at the NPL conference.
    • Neural networks did not resurface as a research topic until the mid-1980s.



    Dartmouth Summer Research Project 


    The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was a watershed moment in the development of AI. 

    The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which began in 1956, brought together a small group of scientists to kick off this area of study. 

    To mark the occasion, more than 100 researchers and academics gathered at Dartmouth for AI@50, a conference that celebrated the past, appraised current achievements, and helped seed ideas for future artificial intelligence research. 

    John McCarthy, then a mathematics professor at the College, convened the first gathering. 

    The meeting would "continue on the basis of the premise that any facet of learning or any other attribute of intelligence may in theory be so clearly characterized that a computer can be constructed to replicate it," according to his plan. 

    The director of AI@50, Professor of Philosophy James Moor, explains that the researchers who came to Hanover 50 years ago were thinking about methods to make robots more aware and sought to set out a framework to better comprehend human intelligence.



    Context Of The Dartmouth AI Conference:


    Cybernetics, automata theory, and sophisticated information processing were all terms used in the early 50s to describe the science of "thinking machines." 


    The wide range of names reflects the wide range of intellectual approaches. 


    In, John McCarthy, a Dartmouth College Assistant Professor of Mathematics, wanted to form a group to clarify and develop ideas regarding thinking machines. 



    • For the new field, he chose the moniker 'Artificial Intelligence.' He picked the term mainly to escape a concentration on limited automata theory and cybernetics, which was largely focused on analog feedback, as well as the possibility of having to accept or dispute with the aggressive Norbert Wiener as guru. 
    • McCarthy addressed the Rockefeller Foundation in early to seek money for a summer seminar at Dartmouth that would attract roughly 150 people. 
    • In June, he and Claude Shannon, then at Bell Labs, met with Robert Morison, Director of Biological and Medical Research, to explore the concept and potential financing, but Morison was skeptical if money would be made available for such a bold initiative. 



    McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon officially proposed the proposal in September. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined as a result of this suggestion. 


    According to the proposal, 


    • We suggest that during the summer of at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, a -month, -man artificial intelligence research be conducted. 
    • The research will be based on the hypothesis that any part of learning, or any other characteristic of intelligence, can be characterized exactly enough for a computer to imitate it. 
    • It will be attempted to figure out how to get robots to speak, develop abstractions and ideas, solve issues that are now reserved for people, and improve themselves. 
    • We believe that if a properly chosen group of scientists worked on one or more of these topics together for a summer, considerable progress might be accomplished. 
    • Computers, natural language processing, neural networks, theory of computing, abstraction, and creativity are all discussed further in the proposal (these areas within the field of artificial intelligence are considered still relevant to the work of the field). 

    He remarked, "We'll focus on the difficulty of figuring out how to program a calculator to construct notions and generalizations. 


    Of course, this is subject to change once the group meets." Ray Solomonoff, Oliver Selfridge, Trenchard More, Arthur Samuel, Herbert A. Simon, and Allen Newell were among the participants at the meeting, according to Stottler Henke Associates. 

    The real participants arrived at various times, most of which were for far shorter periods of time. 


    • Rochester was replaced for three weeks by Trenchard More, and MacKay and Holland were unable to attend—but the project was prepared to commence. 
    • Around June of that year, the first participants (perhaps simply Ray Solomonoff, maybe with Tom Etter) came to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, to join John McCarthy, who had already set up residence there. 
    • Ray and Marvin remained at the Professors' apartments, while the most of the guests stayed at the Hanover Inn.




    List Of Dartmouth AI Conference Attendees:


    1. Ray Solomonoff
    2. Marvin Minsky
    3. John McCarthy
    4. Claude Shannon
    5. Trenchard More
    6. Nat Rochester
    7. Oliver Selfridge
    8. Julian Bigelow
    9. W. Ross Ashby
    10. W.S. McCulloch
    11. Abraham Robinson
    12. Tom Etter
    13. John Nash
    14. David Sayre
    15. Arthur Samuel
    16. Kenneth R. Shoulders
    17. Shoulders' friend
    18. Alex Bernstein
    19. Herbert Simon
    20. Allen Newell


    ~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

    You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.


    See also: 

    Cybernetics and AI; Macy Conferences; McCarthy, John; Minsky, Marvin; Newell, Allen; Simon, Herbert A.


    References & Further Reading:


    Crevier, Daniel. 1993. AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. New York: Basic Books.

    Gardner, Howard. 1985. The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution. New York: Basic Books.

    Kline, Ronald. 2011. “Cybernetics, Automata Studies, and the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33, no. 4 (April): 5–16.

    McCarthy, John. 1955. “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.” Rockefeller Foundation application, unpublished.

    Moor, James. 2006. “The Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years.” AI Magazine 27, no. 4 (Winter): 87–91.

    Solomonoff, R.J.The Time Scale of Artificial Intelligence; Reflections on Social Effects, Human Systems Management, Vol 5 1985, Pp 149-153

    Moor, J., The Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty years, AI Magazine, Vol 27, No., 4, Pp. 87-9, 2006

    ump up to:

    Kline, Ronald R., Cybernetics, Automata Studies and the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, October–December, 2011, IEEE Computer Society


    McCorduck, P., Machines Who Think, A.K. Peters, Ltd, Second Edition, 2004

    Nilsson, N., The Quest for Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge University Press, 2010


    Kline, Ronald R., Cybernetics, Automata Studies and the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, October–December, 2011, IEEE Computer Society, (citing letters, from Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Dartmouth file6, 17, 1955 etc.


    McCarthy, J., Minsky, M., Rochester, N., Shannon, C.E., A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence., http://raysolomonoff.com/dartmouth/boxa/dart564props.pdf August, 1955


    McCarthy, John; Minsky, Marvin; Rochester, Nathan; Shannon, Claude (1955), A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, archived from the original on 2007-08-26, retrieved 2006-04-09 retrieved 10:47 (UTC), 9th of April 2006

     Stottler-Henke retrieved 18:19 (UTC), 27th of July 2006

    Nilsson, N., The Quest for Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge University Press, 2010, P. 53

    Solomonoff, R.J., dart56ray622716talk710.pdf, 1956 URL:{http://raysolomonoff.com/dartmouth/boxbdart/dart56ray622716talk710.pdf

    McCarthy, J., List, Sept., 1956; List among Solomonoff papers to be posted on website solomonof.com
    http://raysolomonoff.com/dartmouth/boxbdart/dart56ray812825who.pdf 1956

    Nilsson, N., The Quest for Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge University Press, 2010,
    personal communication

    McCorduck, P., Machines Who Think, A.K. Peters, Ltd, Second Edition, 2004.

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