Originally posted by Nuke
needless to say i think artificial intelegence will be invented on accident.
*edit* just realised that i it happened on accident then it couldnt be considered artificial 
Probably can't create it intentionally anyways; how would you even
define intelligence, after all?
Although I remember some American bloke setting up a big 10-year project to try and create a sort of 'information library' for an AI; the idea being that in order to have a usable AI you need to provide it with the same sort of rough knowledge base that humans use (what is a tree, what is brown, that sort of thing etc etc). Every night they'd feed in information, and the AI would draw conclusions off it (learning, effectively) - and in the morning they'd review the conclusions made by it.
For example, they AI had problems when given the information that humans shaved - it had trouble distinguishing that the shaver was not part of the human body, and ended up regarding humans and mechanical and thus not alive (or similar, exact details escape me). Very odd conclusions, yet completely logical based on what it knew.
I forget the name of this project, natch, but it should have been 'completed' a few years back. I'd be
very interested if anyone knows of how it developed; if it worked, then it'd be leading towards an AI (maybe not intelligent, so much as a knowledge base able to draw inferences) with a basic understanding of how the real world works.
NB: it wasn't just a case of feeding in information like into a dictionary... the idea was that this AI could take basic facts, draw conclusions, and then continue to draw further conclusions from the basis of both what it had been told and also what it had inferred.
