What is computational intelligence?

While I was giving a presentation last week to my new research group (the Global Ecology Group at the University of Adelaide), I was asked by an ecologist, "What is computational intelligence?"

This is one of those questions that sound really simple, but is actually really hard to answer. At WCCI 2008 in Hong Kong, I attended a panel session on the future of computational intelligence. The panelists spent almost the entire time arguing over what computational intelligence is.

One answer is that computational intelligence is a sub-group of artificial intelligence. But classical AI tends to be more of a top-down approach, that is, the developer tells the machine what it needs to know to solve the problem. To me, computational intelligence is a bottom-up approach, where the algorithm learns what it needs to know to solve the problem.

There are, of course, many algorithms that learn from data, like the C4.5 algorithm for building decision trees, that most people would not consider to be computational intelligence, so I will extend the definition above to include bio-inspired algorithms. That is, algorithms that are inspired by biological processes such as living brains (artificial neural networks), evolution (evolutionary computation), flocking (particle swarm optimisation, which is often included in evolutionary computation) and path-following in ants (ant colony optimisation, which is also often included in evolutionary computation).

However, fuzzy rule-based systems are usually included in the definition of computational intelligence, despite their top-down approach and lack of biological inspiration (although there are ways of constructing fuzzy rules directly from data, like using backpropagation to train the rules and fuzzy membership functions).

The website of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (of which I am a member) defines the scope of the society as:

"The Field of Interest of the Society shall be the theory, design, application, and development of biologically and linguistically motivated computational paradigms emphasizing neural networks, connectionist systems, genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming, fuzzy systems, and hybrid intelligent systems in which these paradigms are contained."

Which is good enough for me. I don't think there will ever be a universally-accepted definition of what computational intelligence is, but that's probably a good thing, because it allows plenty of scope for the field to grow.

AI in Second Life

The IEEE Computer Society is building an AI learning centre on its island in Second Life. It's intended to be a place where AI technologies can be shown off to the public, including the use of intelligent virtual guides (the first of which is based on the famous strategist Sun Tzu, author of the Art of War).

It strikes me as a good idea, and a fairly safe way of testing out technologies in a fairly real-world setting (for various values of "safe" and "real world"). I wonder how much cross-over there will be between this project and the AI in games research community?

Perhaps I will be taking a closer look at Second Life in the future.

Turing Test for Game Bots

The Turing Test is very well known not only within the CI community but within the general public. Made really simple, a machine is intelligent if a human carrying out a conversation with that machine can't tell if it is a machine. In other words, we think it is intelligent, therefore it is intelligent.

A similar test has been proposed for game bots. It is described as follows:

"Suppose you are playing an interactive video game with some entity. Could you tell, solely from the conduct of the game, whether the other entity was a human player or a bot? If not, then the bot is deemed to have passed the test."

Playing games requires, in my opinion, more intelligence than having a conversation. It requires comprehension of the gaming environment, at least on some level, as well as anticipation of the actions of the player and the formulation and application of strategy. I have a suspicion that true general purpose AI will come from the gaming world. There's even a dedicated journal for it, the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

The best part of this is that playing games can be part of your job.