This year AI celebrates its 50th anniversary. Its first task
was to represent reasoning by rule-based systems. John McCarthy (1956) coined the name AI. Ted
Shortliffe created expert systems for inference in medical
diagnosis and therapy. It was the first attempt to formalize medical reasoning.
Despite intensive effort in the so called computer assisted diagnosis, its
relevance to the physician’s reasoning was marginal. Representing reasoning
by a computer program is simply hopeless. Man is neither a machine as
Descartes believed nor can his reasoning be reduced to logical elements.
Even in robotics this machine reasoning failed. The performance of robots
equipped with sophisticated expert systems was disappointing. In the 1980s
Rodney Brooks revolutionized
robot reasoning with subsumption architecture. Robot behavior was stratified
into layers of increasing abstract and complex behaviors. These studies
paved the way to embodied AI dominating robotics today. We may thus distinguish
between pre-embodiment AI of the founding fathers, and today’s embodied
AI.
Intelligence requires a body. Embodiment is the way in which human reasoning
arises from the brain's and body's state. It is an attribute of life and
operates even in an ameba. Even the environment in which the body operates
is part of the embodiment since triggering its state. Embodiment marks the
entry of phenomenology into the exact sciences. Heideggers Dasein (explained
in the previous section) is the hallmark of embodiment.
In my studies I represent embodiment by the Wisdom of the Body (WOB) metaphor.
http://www.what-is-cancer.com/papers/ca/ca93.htm
CA are essentially embodied since the entire state determines its subsequent
state. However Dasein is more than that. It includes also the environment
which CA generally ignore. Embodiment means also interaction, which depends
on the number of neighbors (r) involved in the computation of the subsequent
state. The greater ‘r’ the more environmental cells are involved in the
computation of the subsequent state. Most CA in Wolfram’s book are more
or less isolated (lonely) like the class-4 structures (p. 282).
In the previous section I explained why Wolfram classified CA only into
four classes. We may now add the fifth, consisting of embodied CA which
completely interact with their neighbors. Yet they have an “unpleasant”
quality. This class-5 cannot be reduced to its elements and may only be
treated phenomenologically.
v. Embodied CA:
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