A Chance to Try Artificial Intelligence at Home
Texas Instruments has long been at the forefront of technology--digital watches and digital calculators come to mind, as does the digitized voice used in its Speak ‘n Spell children’s toy and voice recognition systems for office computers.
These days the company is making a big push to introduce artificial intelligence to the masses.
AI, as it’s known, is one of those new technologies that has been hanging around on the horizon for the last 10 to 15 years but thus far has seemed more artificial than intelligent.
One of the problems with that perception is that it is based mostly on ignorance, and if TI is doing anything, it is certainly making it easy to get over being ignorant about AI.
Twice during the past year (and apparently to return at six-month intervals in the future), TI has hosted a satellite symposium on artificial intelligence. The last one, in June, played in 33 cities and was free to anyone who wished to attend. In addition, about 800 corporations, universities and governmental agencies established their own satellite links to the TI show so that an estimated 45,000 people participated.
What you got for a few hours of your time was a quick, and nearly commercial free, education on the current state of artificial intelligence technology and how it is being used in an intriguing variety of applications.
Of course, TI sells computers designed for AI applications, as well as software to run on them, but symposium participants learned about a lot of other companies’ products as well. I frankly don’t recall ever hearing less hype or getting more solid information in a corporate-sponsored event.
Artificial intelligence is still a bit of a misnomer because computers that can actually think and reason have not been invented. But it’s clear that AI is fully functional for something called an “expert system.”
Such systems don’t reason for you, but they do pull together an enormous amount of expertise on a subject--the sort of knowledge that might reside within the mind of a single senior expert who knows everything there is to know about operating a complex manufacturing process, for instance, or the collective wisdom of the engineers who designed an industrial robot, or the molecular structures possible in organic chemistry.
Such systems are based on intricate networks of rules that a computer can quickly analyze as it asks more and more specific questions of the user until it is finally able to pinpoint the answer or possible answers.
Buying the hardware and software required to create such a system is the easy part of the task, TI symposium participants learned. What is more critical is choosing a knowledge base that is valuable enough to one’s business to be worth the time and expense of creating a system, gaining access to the expert knowledge upon which the system would be based and then getting people to make use of it once it’s in place.
Such systems take months to create, probably require the talents of AI consultants and cost tens of thousands of dollars and up.
But there are less expensive, less complex ways to build a small expert system. TI sells a program called Personal Consultant for $950 and Personal Consultant Plus for $2,950, both of which run on personal computers.
Both programs--Personal Consultant Plus is faster, more powerful and allows development of more complex systems--lead you through the process of writing the rules, assigning probabilities to them and writing the questions that will be asked of the user to determine which rules apply.
A trivial example:
Questions: Are you uncomfortably hot? What time of day is it? Where is the thermostat set? Are the windows open?
Rules: If the user is hot, and it’s after 12:00 p.m., and the thermostat is more than 80 degrees and the windows are open, then . . .
Recommendations: Close the windows and lower the thermostat to turn on the air conditioning.
Even at $950, however, one has to be very serious about creating a useful expert system.
But if you just want to play around with AI and you have about $100 to spend, either TI or Borland International can sell you a programming language that will get you started.
TI offers PC Scheme, a version of the AI programming language called LISP, for $95, while Borland’s $99.95 product is Turbo Prolog, a version of the competing AI language Prolog.
Turbo Prolog (Prolog stands for “programming in logic,” while LISP comes from “list processing”) is the more accessible of the two language packages for beginners.
Just as Borland did with Turbo Pascal, they have produced a slick package in Turbo Prolog that tutors the beginning programmer in the use of the language. Increasingly complex programming examples presented through a well-written manual will lead you to the ability to write significant applications if you stick with it.
TI’s PC Scheme, on the other hand, is aimed at those who already know how to program in the Scheme dialect of LISP. If not, you’ll have to buy the college text recommended in the user guide and reference manual that comes with the program before you can do anything with it. It is a significant language, however. Both Personal Consultant and Personal Consultant Plus were written in PC Scheme.
Finally, if you’re not ready to create an expert system or play with Turbo Prolog or Scheme, you can call TI at (800) 527-3500 and order its $200 “starter kit” that includes 10 1/2 hours of videotape from the two symposiums, a demo disk of the Personal Consultant software and a couple of books about AI.
