The reach of the artificial intelligence

Thought to reinaugurate my personal binnacle this very day with an article on a new software of Nokia, but the circumstances have encouraged me to write on another matter, that in my opinion is more interesting.

I have just returned home, after a session of movies of, how not, the Episode III of Star Wars. My personal analysis of the movie, if perhaps vaguely was able to interest someone, perhaps be cash in another occasion. The case is that we went to see it with some friends, and on the way out, after the opportune comments on the same one, the debate went little by little displacing to another theme: That of the badly called artificial intelligence. My friend Miguel, like so many other people that know, is of the opinion that in a period of brief time we would be able to reach cognitive processes by means of the technology and the know-how on IA that are developing. Trying to cause to see how complex is that problem, I realized that is really difficult to explain it in few words.

Perhaps one of the motives that causes more confusion in the people that does not know the theme closely is that Hollywood and the science fiction novels have approached the concept, something not too complicated if we keep in mind the moment of technological development that at present live, especially in the fields of the data processing and the automatic one. But it is really difficult to cause to see those same people that the field of knowledge that the human Being has erred in calling artificial intelligence (I would call it engineering applied in base to human knowledge in enclosed controls, but would be a very long title) moves away a lot of the cognitive processes of understanding and reason that use daily almost without perceiving it.

The truth is that had always fascinated me the theme of the IA, and still today does it, but logically with a very different point of view from the initial one. They are many problems with which us we find at the moment of to simulate the thought. In the country physical, we have with which we work in very different controls. The neurons of our brain interact by means of electrochemical processes, where they exchange so much electric signs as chemical signs. Besides, they operate in an analog world, of real numbers of infinite length. The current computational systems work especially on a base of silicon, where only there is exchange of electric signs, that are modulated to obtain the different binary values with the ones that to operate in that digital world. But a greater problem exists, and is the little knowledge that have on the form in which the human reason in the most basic levels functions.

An excellent book exists that comes to explain the medium reader, of an incredibly clear form, this problem. Treats, as not, of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal and Graceful Loop. In this best-seller, also Prize Pulitzer and, as if that were not enough, prizewinner with the American one Book Award, Douglas R. Hofstadter, divulgador marvelous that infects its passion and its imagination, son of the Nobel prize of Physical Robert Hofstadter, does a traveled through by different fields of the knowledge to open us the doors to the enigma. Strange loops, the problem of the incompletitud, acertijos, enigmas and proposals formally indecidibles are some of the keys that expect us in the almost 900 pages of this formidable scientific trial. When it have just read it, i would like to carry out another small article by way of summary on the theme, but for now, and keeping in mind that was not going to be able to imitate so excellent author, I am going to limit me to cite literally an introductory paragraph that finish of convincing to the undecided one for, at least, to encourage it to his reading:

Every language, formal every system, every program of computer, every process of thought, he arrives, sooner or later, to the extreme situation of the autorreferencia: to wanted to be expressed on itself. The emotion of the infinite arises then, as two mirrors faced and obliged to be reflected mutual and indefinitely. Hands drawing, of M. C. Escher, lithography from 1948 The human Being is marvelous. There we are resolved problems really complexes with the passage of time, and each time that look at him sufficiently behind in our history we understand that the thinkers of the epoch with difficulty would be able to have come to imagine even many of the developments that for us today are routine. But handsome to that we are far from reaching an objective as pretentious as that of the artificial thought. What does not mean that the advances in artificial intelligence be not equipment, therefore nowadays they are helping to improve many aspects of the life; the expert systems, for example, they are contributing a lot to the preventive medicine or of diagnosis.