Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Artificial Intelligence in Action


The emphasis on rule-based systems in the mid-1980's was a mistaken notion based on experience with mostly toy systems. The work of John R. Anderson was the exception. He continued to evolve tutoring systems that worked off a combination of rules and knowledge structures.



I have been working on programs since August that use some alternate approaches to applying AI techniques. The classic architecture of "generate and test" still works. The major component of the "generate" portion are heuristic rating systems and some just plain "hacks". I quickly found that in my problem domain of choice, that I had to go beyond principles and look at performance with real world data. In conjunction with the heuristic rating systems, I also use some extremely simple machine learning. Those two together seem to be producing adequate performance. I will continue to tweak and test every day, as new ideas occur to me and I see the results of applying what I have.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Megan McArdle?




I have been curious as to what is happening to Megan McArdle. She has kept moving to the left as she has switched employers. The Atlantic certainly is a left-leaning publication, which is fine in itself. She was running along, blogging frequently, and then lately has fallen strangely silent. I hope she is OK. She was going to get married and then decided that they couldn't afford to marry. So what is up? At least she finally spoke up today with several blog posts after being quiet for some days. I find her present political orientation understandable, as Megan started out on the far left, and then picked up libertarian tendencies. I was fooled prior to 2008 into thinking that she was center-right. At best, she is center left, but probably just left.

Friday, October 9, 2009

The Nobel Peace Prize

Barack Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize just shows how politicized the award has become. What did Obama do, promise to close Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention center and then not do it?