Download College of Business book review by David Coffee Title

College of Business book review by David Coffee
Title: “Artificial Intelligence: A Beginner’s Guide”
Author: Blay Whitby
Publisher: ONEWORLD Oxford
Length: 144 pages
Price: $15.95
Reading Time: 8 hours
Reading Rating: 4 (1 = very difficult; 10 = very easy)
Overall rating: 4 (1 = average; 4 = outstanding)
Blay Whitby, a lecturer in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University
of Sussex, England has done a wonderful job of making the elusive and sometimes
mysterious and intriguing field of Artificial Intelligence understandable to those of us
with only a minimal computer background. In his book, “Artificial Intelligence: A
Beginner’s Guide,” Whitby describes the numerous approaches used in creating
intelligence in machines and consistently provides understandable concrete examples to
illustrate what is often rather complex and abstract ideas.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the study of intelligent behavior in humans, animals, and
machines and the attempt to find ways in which such behavior could be engineered in any
type of artifact. Whitby succeeds in explaining Artificial Intelligence and the excitement
around it in a non-technical and to the extent possible, a jargon-free discussion. Artificial
Intelligence is one of the most – possibly the most- exciting challenges that humanity has
ever undertaken. But Whitby manages to present it without the hype and bias so often
accompanying an area where myths lurk everywhere and misunderstanding and
unrealistic expectations are all to prevalent.
Whitby provides remarkably clear examples of the different approaches to AI. The book
builds in the reader a basic and elementary understanding of AI techniques of heuristic
search-based methods, constraint-based reasoning, knowledge-based expert systems,
neural networks, data mining, genetic algorithms, and behavior-based robotics. Did I say
jargon free? AI is a broad field with many competing approaches. These different
approaches have both great potential and imposing limitations, but each has demonstrated
success in real world applications. A computer (Deep Blue) beat Gary Kasparov in
chess in 1997 using heuristic search; NASA relies heavily on AI to schedule the sequence
of events leading to a shuttle launch, using constraint-based reasoning; Stanford Medical
School uses a program MYCIN, based on a knowledge-based expert system to make
medical diagnosis; American Express uses Authorizer’s Assistant, based on a knowledgebased system to assist in loan decisions. Examples of successful applications litter the
chapters of Whitby’s book.
But the real fascination of the book is in its candid appraisal of the limitations of AI as
well as its potential. To understand the limitations, Whitby looks at human intelligence
and how complex it is and how little we understand about how humans think and reach
conclusions. Indeed AI based research has specifically illustrated and magnified how
very little we understand about human intelligence. Human thought is believed to be
conducted through neurons firing in the brain, passing impulses from one to another
when certain thresholds are exceeded. While an area of AI, neural nets, attempts to
crudely model this using inputs, nodes, and outputs, the complexity of the human brain
with its billions of neurons and its chemical and electrical processes remains essentially a
black box. We understand very little of it and our inability to even try to model this
process on a digital computer has created the myth that AI is a failure.
Whitby concludes that at the moment we know so little about human intelligence, other
than it is truly wonderful, that this is unlikely to help in the development of AI. This
leads some people to conclude that what is being talked about is not intelligence at all.
“Either its just like me or it’s just a machine following instructions.”
The reality is that AI is a very young science. It is progressing at a rapid pace and it
already has leveraged human intelligence and will leverage it exponentially in the future.
How? Whitby’s speculation is exciting. The book is well worth reading to find out.
David Coffee is an associate professor of accounting in the College of Business at
Western Carolina University. For previously reviewed books visit our Web site at
www.wcu.edu/cob/.