Machine Intelligence
March, 1996

Robert N. Seitz, Ph, D.

Opening Remarks:

The Task
    This effort represents an attempt to create a human surrogate, including emotions, drives, self-awareness, a set of moral/ethical principles, and a sense of humor. Although this model will require extensive pre-programming, it is not to be programmed to do anything specific except to learn and then to live. It is to be driven by "urges", moderated by the interplay of conflicting influences within its developing "ego" and "personality".

The Magnitude of the Task
    These are very ambitious—even grandiose—goals. The reason for beginning with a human rather than an animal model of intelligence is that
    (1) it is difficult to know what traits are essential and what traits are discretionary, and
    (2) I can try to delineate the mechanisms that allow human beings to do what we do but I can't guess comparably well at how (simpler) animal minds operate.

Reasons for Optimism
    I am heartened by the progress being made in emulating on desktop PCs such uniquely human capabilities as speech, cursive handwriting, and optical character recognition, speech synthesis, machine vision, bipedal locomotion, and natural language processing. We can't match human capabilities in these areas yet but we're getting closer . I am also heartened by the progress which has been made in defining neural functions and in conceptually devising ways of performing them on computers. Of course, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
    This paper contains a few ideas about what the mind appears to do, coupled with ideas about how the same or similar functions might be emulated in silicon.
    A preliminary analysis of mental processes  over the last few months has led me to the idea that the mind appears to be exceedingly complex. It appears to me that there is a rich abundance of mechanisms that make us what we are, as opposed to one or a few underlying principles.

Approach
    Emulating the human mind is a "grand challenge" and a fascinating topic. It may be that we will not achieve the thousandth part of what we are attempting. It may be decades or centuries before we are successful at artificial intelligence. However, the process might yield a lot of useful information, including, if nothing else, a measure of just how difficult this problem is. Even if we are only able to achieve insectile intelligence in a computer, there should be many commercial applications
    Some of the best minds on six continents are working on this problem or upon aspects of it, and I have begun to draw upon these efforts. It is my hope that it will be possible to identify an interest group to pursue these topics and to integrate what is already available or potentially available . It should be a highly-interesting project. (If you would be interested in one or more aspects of this project, or in being kept up-to-date on its progress, I would welcome your inputs or interest.)

A Brief Review of Artificial Intelligence
The Parallelism of Biological Nervous Systems
The Great Gray Ravelled Knot
Neural Nets and Artificial Neurons.doc
Incorporation of Developing AI Technologies.doc
Feelings
Generation of Ego
How It Might Work
Sleep
Hunger
Putting It to the Test
An Expert System for Learning and Discovery
Partitioning a Video Tape into Events.doc