March 2005 Introduction Back in 1995, applets seemed so wonderful. James Gosling, one of Java's developers, recalls a demonstration he gave to a group of Internet and entertainment professionals: As the talk began, Gosling noticed that many people were only casually paying attention. After all, what was so exciting about
February 2005 New Downloads Course notes and samples for an introductory Prolog course are now available from the downloads section of www.ainewsletter.com. The course includes a logic-base approach to a normal business application, airline pricing and booking; numerous exercises in recursion and nested structures; and a frame-based system with property
January 2005 Introduction Welcome to a new year and the January AI 2005 Expert. This month, I decided to take a cue from the Christmas special issue magazines and do something a little different. So I've put together an alphabetical Artificial Intelligence miscellany for your delight and delectation. AI being
December 2004 Introduction Welcome to the December AI Expert. In this issue, I look at programming the Sony Aibo robot dog, the World Wide Mind, and (with some help from Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams), Ronald Reagan. But first, some truly remarkable neural network news from
AI Code Corner November 2004 Welcome to the November 2004 Newsletter. I like Prolog, and have used it as my language of choice for various applications, including expert systems, analysing financial data, and teaching AI at Oxford University. My most recent project is an algebraic manipulation system for safe spreadsheet construction, to try and reduce
October 2004 Procedural Languages and AI In this newsletter we've looked at symbolic languages like Mozart, SML, Lisp and Prolog for developing AI applications. These languages are good for AI because they make it easier to model and manipulate the knowledge structures of a particular application domain. They allow the
September 2004 Diplomacy Have you ever played Hasbro's (was Avalon Hill's) game Diplomacy? I've only played it a few times but found it to be one of the best games I'd ever played. It requires seven players, each running a European country around World
August 2004 The code from last month's newsletter is finally available in the download area of www.ainewsletter.com. As always, any and all feedback is welcome. Also, anyone interested in contributing to the newsletter: book reviews, product reviews, overviews of areas of research, collections of good links in a
AI Code Corner July 2004 As work slowed down for the summer, and inspired by the thriving interactive fiction (IF) community detailed in last month's newsletter, I decided to spend more time on interactive fiction (IF) tools, so that's what this newsletter is about. In one sense, its a specialized application
AI Code Corner June 2004 Fantasy Games Adventure was the first computer fantasy game. It had all of the elements we see today in Nintendo and Play Station fantasy games, where the computer has a model of an environment and the player manipulates a character in the game, travelling from place to place, encountering various
May 2004 Genetic Programming (GP) The fun thing about AI is all the biological sorts of terms used to describe cold programming algorithms, starting, of course, with the coining of the phrase "artificial intelligence" to replace the rather boring label "heuristic programming". Genetic search algorithms follow this proud
AI Code Corner April 2004 Interactive Web-Based Experts Like all computer programs, expert systems take input, process it, and provide output. For example, an expert system might input symptoms and output a diagnosis; input customer requirements and output a product configuration; or input a robot's situation and output an action. In many cases
March 2004 Notes The diagrams that were supposed to appear in the last two month's newsletters didn't display on most people's systems. The newsletters are archived at an alternate site, www.ainewsletter.com, that has copies of the issues with the pictures. This month's
AI Code Corner February 2004 The February 2004 newsletter is really a companion piece for the January 2004 newsletter. January discussed fuzzy logic and its usefulness for control systems, and included discussions of some simple examples. This month's newsletter has the code used for the experiments in January. It is a fuzzy logic
AI Code Corner Janaury 2004 Errata It appears for the past few months, my e-mail address has stopped working, so I apologize for ignoring any correspondence during that time. Seeing as it needs fixing, and our Internet guru advises using contact sheets. For those who asked for the prototype code for the disease interaction system
December 2003 Errata A few newsletters back I promised to only cut and paste working code in newsletters. I messed up again, sigh. The prices are wrong in the rules in the newsletter. As one reader pointed out, the rule-based approach is just as error prone as other methods. (the error has
AI Code Corner November 2003 Rules Business rules is the current term for a type of knowledge that is knotty to automate. The type of knowledge it refers to is logical knowledge, as distinct from factual knowledge or procedural knowledge. Factual knowledge is exactly that, and it can very naturally be stored in a computer
October 2003 RoboCup News The RoboCup-2003 competitions were held in Padua Italy in July. There were a number of levels of competition, from simulation, with no real robots, up to humanoid. Humanoid robots just compete at penalty kicks and the like at this point. Each year the rules of the competitions are
AI Code Corner September 2003 I've been meaning to add code corners to the last few newsletters but hadn't found the time. So this newsletter will be all about building the types of AI systems discussed in the last few issues. In other words, this is an issue for those who
August 2003 Semantic Web Clearly an interesting thing to do with the Internet is to create robots that can search out answers to questions. Suppose you wanted to find out who was the editor the Dr. Dobb's AI Expert Newsletter. Any human could answer that question in a minute or
July 2003 Can Machines Think? Turing Test In 1950 Alan Turing published Computing Machinary and Intelligence in the quarterly journal, Mind. Thanks to the Internet, its now easy to read this original article that is still to this day one of the defining works in AI. It is a great read. In
June 2003 Feedback One reader asked if Prolog was psychic and could tell that Price and PriceCents were the same in this example. Unfortunately psychic versions are only available at advanced wizardry research institutions. Normal programmers have to spell all their variables the same. price(StartHour, DurationMinutes, PriceCents) :- StartHour < 7,
AI Code Corner May 2003 Middle East A classic story tells of blind men describing an elephant, each with his own ideas based on which part of the elephant he was touching. In my work providing software for educational institutions I get to touch the Middle East. I've recently touched, via the Internet,
Code Corner April 2003 As always, feedback is welcome. Reasoning about Uncertainty, Bayesian Belief Networks Certainty Factors The first expert systems were research efforts in the medical diagnostic domain. The researchers quickly found out that dealing with, and propagating, uncertainty was a critical issue for medical systems. Typically medical experts hedged their opinions with
March 2003 We have quantum information and a commercial robot product review this month. As always, feedback is welcome. Quantum Information Whenever we learn some fundamental different way of looking at things, our views of the familiar change. What was once obvious truth, becomes just a specific example of a broader, larger
