Inversion of Control as I see it in AI

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Strong AI - The belief that a computational engine can show intelligence. A stronger form of belief is that the human mind is also a computation engine. Mathematically intelligence is equivalent to church-turning machine!!!

Weak AI - The belief that intelligence can be studied by the aid of a computational engine. Computation can help in also simulating intelligence. It does not believe in a computational engine showing true/indepent intelligence. The most famous theorem being Godel's theorem.

Traditional web search - People were trying to build intelligence into the search engine. Search engine had bulky logic to rank search results. This logic had to be AI.

Google Search - Identified that search ranking cannot be solved only AI. Instead of using AI for search ranking, they used social behaviour. Social measure of something being popular is based on how many people know about it. Google used this for their PageRank algorithm. Of course a lot of AI concepts were used, but not as the backbone. Inversion of Control!!

Taxonomy - The earlier trend was to categorize information using automation. Build natural language processing to categorize knowledge.

Tags - The current trend used in categorizing information. It does not use natural language processing, but uses social behaviour. You have a photo, you know about a web page - go ahead and tag it. Tags act like categories. Most of the people will use the same tags. Lo, you have your cateogory. Most popular being Flickr, del.ic.ious, where you tag photos, links.
Inversion of Control!!

Music Player - All music players arrange music either by directory, artist or genre. What if I could tag songs based on my mood, my category? That would be great!!