Talk:History of artificial intelligence/GA1

GA Review

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Hi, I'll be reviewing this article. I hope to post my review in the next couple of days and then pass the article or put it on hold for improvements. Wronkiew (talk) 18:08, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Overview

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

Prose

• "The history of artificial intelligence begins in antiquity with myths, stories and rumors of artificial beings endowed with intelligence and consciousness by master craftsman." Tense problems. The list of synonyms isn't needed.

Should this be "began"? Doesn't seem quite right to me. Also, don't quite agree that these are synonyms. Hephaestus' Talos appears in myth, Frankenstein's monster appears in a story, Paracelsus' homunculous was a rumor. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 05:12, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

• "In the Middle Ages, it was believed that there were secret mystical or alchemical means of placing mind into matter, such as Geber's Takwin, Paracelsus' homunculus and Rabbi Judah Loew's Golem." This is unnecessarily verbose because "it" doesn't refer to anything.  Fixed[1] Changed to 'rumors of secret mystical ...'.
• "In the 1940s and 50s, a number of scientist from many fields (mathematics, psychology, engineering, economics and political science) began to explore the possibility of creating an artificial brain." Verbose and number mismatch. Replace with "several scientists". This phrase also appears elsewhere in the article. Fixed[2] Rewritten as "a handful of scientist from a variety of fields", making the sentence more informative.
• "Robots that displayed rudimentary intelligence were built, including W. Grey Walter's turtles and the Johns Hopkins Beast." Awkward. Rewrite to use active voice. Fixed[3] Rewritten as "Robots built at this time, such as Grey Walter's Turtles and the Johns Hopkins Beast, ..."
• "This simplified version of the problem allowed Turing to argue convincingly that a 'thinking machine' was at least plausible and the paper answered all of the most common objections to the proposition." Verbose. Replace with "all the". Fixed|[4]
• "At the conference Newell and Simon debuted the 'Logic Theorist' and McCarthy convinced the majority of attendees to accept 'Artificial Intelligence' as the name of the field." Replace with "persuaded most". Fixed[5] Replaced with "persuaded the"
• "The principle difficulty was that, for many problems, the number of possible paths through the "maze" was simply astronomical (this is called a "combinatorial explosion")." Replace with "principal". Fixed[6]
• "Other "searching" programs were able to accomplish impressive tasks like solving problems in geometry and algebra: Herbert Gelernter's Geometry Theorem Prover (1958) and SAINT written by Minsky's student James Slagle (1961)." Needs a comma before "written". Fixed[7]
• "A semantic net represents concepts (e.g. "house","door") as nodes and relations between concepts (e.g. "has-a") as links between the nodes." Replace with "among". Fixed[8]
• "The money was proffered with few strings attached: J. C. R. Licklider, then the director of ARPA, felt that his organization should "fund people, not projects!" and allowed researchers to pursue whatever directions might interest them." This was not a feeling. Replace with "said" since this is a quote, or "thought". Fixed[9] Replaced with "believed".
• "This created a freewheeling atmosphere at MIT that gave birth to the hacker culture,[58] but this "hands off" approach would soon come to an end." Verbose, just "end" will do. Fixed[10] Replaced with "would not last"
• "Even the most impressive could only handle trivial versions of the problems they were supposed to solve; all of the programs were, in some sense, 'toys'." Replace with "all the". Fixed[11]
• "Hans Moravec blamed the crisis on the unrealistic predictions of his colleagues." This sentence is missing a space after the period. Fixed|[12]
• "A number of philosophers had strong objections to the claims being made by AI researchers." Replace with "several". Fixed[13]
• "Hubert Dreyfus ridiculed the broken promises of the 60s and critiqued the assumptions of AI, arguing that human reasoning actually involved very little 'symbol processing' and a great deal of embodied, instinctive, unconscious 'know how'." Should be "criticized". Also, the "know how" part is pompous and wordy and needs to be simplified.

 Fixed "criticized"

I disagree here about the pomposity (sp?), since each of these four terms ("embodied", "instinctive", "unconscious" and "know how"=Heidegger's ready-to-hand) is an important aspect of the kind of knowledge that Dreyfus is interested in. The hard thing about a sentence like this one is that we're summarizing the contents of several dense books of philosophy into a single line. I think this about the best we can do here. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:54, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

• "These critiques were not taken seriously by AI researchers, often because they seemed so far off the point: problems like intractability and commonsense knowledge seemed much more immediate and serious; it wasn't clear what difference 'know how' or 'intensionality' made to an actual program." Expand the contraction. Also, don't follow a colon with a semicolon unless it's separating the elements of a list.  Fixed the semi colon.[14]

I disagree about the contraction, since it places to much emphasis on the negation and ruins the flow.---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:54, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

• "However, straight forward implementations, like those attempted by McCarthy and his students in the late 60s, were especially intractable: the programs required astronomical numbers of steps to prove simple theorems." Replace with "straightforward". Fixed[15]
• "McCarthy responded that what people do is irrelevant and pointed out that we don't need machines that think as people do, we need machines that can solve problems that people normally solve by thinking." Expand the contraction.

As before, I disagree about the contraction, since it places to much emphasis on the negation and ruins the flow.---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:54, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

• "Many years later object-oriented programming would adopt the essential of idea 'inheritance' from AI research on frames." Maybe "essence of" or "essential idea of". Fixed[16]
• "The 1980s also saw the birth of Cyc, the first attempt attack the most commonsense knowledge problem directly, by creating a massive database that would contain all the mundane facts that the average person knows." I think there's a missing "to". Fixed[17]
• "Douglas Lenat, who initiated and led the project, argued that there is no shortcut ― the only way for machines to know the meaning of human concepts is to teach them, one concept at a time, by hand." You can use the shorter word "started" here. Fixed[18]
• "In the late 80s, a number of researchers advocated a completely new approach to artificial intelligence, based on robotics." Several. Fixed[19]
• "An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success." Number disagreement. Replace with "actions which maximize" or "actions to maximize". Fixed[20]
• "Minsky believes that the answer is that the central problems, like commonsense reasoning, were being neglected, while the majority of researchers pursued things like commercial applications of neural nets or genetic algorithms." Most. Fixed[21]
• "Artificial intelligence problems that had begun to seem impossible in 1970 have been solved and are now successful commercial products." The problems are now products? Fixed[22]
• The "AI winter" needs to be combined into three or four paragraphs.

Not feeling this one, since each paragraph here is on a different topic. Could be a bullet list, if you like. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:54, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

• Split long sentences to improve readability:
  • "In the middle of the 20th century, a handful of scientists began to explore a new approach to this ancient idea based on their discoveries in neurology, a new mathematical theory of information, an understanding of control and stability called cybernetics, and above all, by the invention of the digital computer, a machine based on the abstract essence of mathematical reasoning."
  • "But, despite the rise and fall of AI in the perceptions of venture capitalists and government bureaucrats, AI has made continuous advances in all areas regardless of the climate, overcoming unexpected obstacles, reorienting priorities in light of new discoveries and riding the crest of the wave of increasing computer power." In addition to the excessive length and multiple lists, there is a missing comma, and the "reorienting priorities" part doesn't make any sense. Also, don't start sentences with a conjunction.
  • "Seven years later, the Japanese Government and American industry would provide AI with billions of dollars, but again the investors would be disappointed and by the late 80s the funding would dry up again."
  • "In the 1940s, a number of scientist became interested in the relationship between the human brain (which had recently been shown to be an electrical network of neurons that fired in all-or-nothing pulses) and Norbert Weiner's cybernetics (which described electrical networks) and Claude Shannon's information theory (which described all-or-nothing signals) and Alan Turing's theory of computation." Rewrite to break out the parenthesized statements. The sentence is essentially a list with every element separated by an "and". Fixed[23]. Rewritten to break this up.
  • "Hans Moravec argued in 1976 that computers were still millions of times too weak to exhibit intelligence and suggested an analogy: artificial intelligence requires computer power in the same way that aircraft require horsepower; below a certain threshold, it's impossible, but, as power increases, eventually it could become easy." Fixed[24] Broke this up as recommended.
  • "It would eventually dawn on many AI researchers working with vision and robotics that tasks like proving theorems or solving geometry problems were easy for computers to carry out, but supposedly 'simple' tasks like recognizing a face or crossing a room without bumping into anything were extremely difficult."
  • "Many AI programs used the same basic algorithm in the early years of AI research: to achieve some goal (like winning a game or proving a theorem) and they proceeded step by step towards it (by making a move or a deduction) as if searching through a maze, backtracking whenever they reached a dead end."
  • "AI had solved a lot of very difficult problems and their solutions proved to be useful throughout the technology industry, such as data mining, industrial robotics, logistics, speech recognition, banking software, medical diagnosis and Google's search engine to name a few." Also, "to name a few" is redundant. Fixed "to name a few" [25].

Length doesn't bother me here. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:54, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

• • "Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert and Roger Schank were trying to solve problems like 'story understanding' and 'object recognition' that required a machine to think like a person--in order to use ordinary concepts like 'chair' or 'restaurant' they had to make all the same illogical assumptions that people normally made."  Fixed[26] as recommended.

MoS

• Lead section
  • "Progress has been slower than predicted but has continued nonetheless." This is redundant.
• Layout
  • The portal link and the "History of computing" navbox belong at the end of the article, not next to the table of contents.
  • Dump the external link in "Timeline of artificial intelligence" and eliminate the section. Fixed[27]
• Words to avoid
  • "Simon claimed that they had 'solved the venerable mind/body problem, explaining how a system composed of matter can have the properties of mind.'" Not an acceptable use of "claimed". Fixed[28]
  • "Like most AI researchers, he made optimistic claims about their power, predicting that 'perceptron may eventually be able to learn, make decisions, and translate languages.'" You can just say "he predicted".
  • "They showed that there were severe limitations to what perceptrons could do and that Frank Rosenblatt's claims had been grossly exaggerated." He was wrong. You don't have to rub it in.

Scope

• Speculations about the future course of AI research do not belong in this article.

Can't find this. Are you talking about Kurzweil? ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 05:43, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

References

• Citations like "The alchemical creation of life" belong in the "References" section, not the "Notes" section.
• External links should be moved to the references section, and web citations need authors.
• The Hobbes reference links to a disambiguation page for Leviathan.
• Book citations could use some more detail, like publishers, place of publication, and ISBN.
• Combine links to McCarthy's presentation.
• Eliminate repetitive internal links from the references section.

Attribution

• "Indeed, some of them, like "carry on a casual conversation" had not been met in 2001, and may not be met by 2011." Needs a reference.

Image captions

• "The ENIAC, at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. (U.S. Army Photo)" Move the image source to the image description page.

Well written article. There are a lot of issues because it's big, but most of them are minor. I'm putting the review on hold so the article can be improved. Let me know if you have any questions, otherwise I hope to promote it to GA status when I come back. Wronkiew (talk) 07:12, 7 October 2008 (UTC)