CSC 101 CompLit, Fall 1996
Merrie Bergmann
Ileana Streinu
Dominique Thiébaut

Artificial Intelligence: Twenty Questions

Read Chapter 8, and answer the following twenty questions. Send them to me (orourke) via email from your cs101bxx account on sophia. It might help to first prepare your answers in a file, using the pico editor (although this is not necessary). And then when you are satisified with your answers, mail the file to me, as follows. Suppose you create a file called HW9 with

% pico HW9

Then execute pine, compose a message as usual, but with your cursor in the message body, choose the ^R option, to read in a file. It will say "Insert file from home directory:" and expect you to give the file name HW9 (in this case). It then reads in that file as the body of the message. This method is useful if you might not finish the message in one sitting, as you can continue to augment and modify the file HW9 with pine, just as you modified the file home.html in HW6.

Answers may be terse as long as they are accurate. (Please identify each answer in accordance with my numbering!)

1. In what year was the phrase "artificial intelligence" coined?

2. When did the "Turk" automaton tour America? (An approximate date [within 10 years] suffices.)

3. In what year was the "Turing Test" introduced?

4. What do the authors estimate is the memory capacity of a human brain?

5. Do the authors justify this estimate? (A highly questionable estimate in my opinion.)

6. What do the authors believe future progress in AI will more be limited by: hardware or software?

7. In the two sentences,

"Time flies like an arrow."

"Fruit flies like a bannana."

the word "flies" falls into two different grammatical categories. Which categories, in the first, and in the second sentences?

8. Is this example intended to illustrate the importance in understanding language of

grammatical rules , or

rules (in general), or

experiential knowledge of the real world?

9. What do the authors say about commercial speech recognition systems today?

10. Are there any programs today whose language understanding capability is equal to that of HAL?

11. The game tree shown in Figure 8.2 [p.317] is partial in two senses: first, it only shows two levels (consider the empty board root the zeroth level); and second, even the levels shown are incomplete. The balloon on p.316 says the authors "used symmetry to reduce the number of game states." Suppose they had not. The figure shows three board positions on the first level; but the first level really has nine board positions, one for each possible first O-move. Similarly, the second level shown is incomplete due to their use of symmetry (and due to ellipsis). For example, the leftmost first-level board really has eight descendants rather than the five shown, because there are eight possible second X-moves.

How many board positions would appear on the second level (the bottom level in the figure), in total, if all nine first level positions were shown, and all second-level descendants were shown, i.e., if symmetry were not used to reduce the possibilities?

12. How many legal board position are there in the game of chess (approximately)?

13. [Extra credit, 2pts; no penalty for skipping] If 1 billion (109) board positions were examined by a computer every second (about the fastest imaginable even with future hardware: one per nanosecond), could all legal chess positions be examined by one computer within the estimated age of the universe, 1020 years? Support your answer with computations.

14. What is an expert system?

15. Are there any programs today whose vision capability is equal to that of HAL?

16. What does the acronynm "OCR" stand for?

17. What percentage of characters do today's OCR programs read correctly?

18. One often hears the claim that "Computers only do what we tell them to do." What is misleading about this as a claim that they are limited to only what we know how to program them to perform?

19. Does HAL think he is conscious?

20. What is one of the few personality traits that HAL fails to demonstrate?