----------------------- ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ----------------------- Dan, Amiga musician and AMOS guru continues Neil Wright's artificial intelligence series of articles with a brief introduction to A.I and what it can do for you........... "When all science could provide was 16K and seven colour computers, vaguely `intelligent' computers exisisted only in films. Rows and rows of lights signalled frantic computation and analysis. Most of all these computers were incapable of human feelings. This lead to the immensly powerful computer villain; a computer which was able to think faster and possessed intelligence far greater than man's. This lead to the much publicised horror stories of computers taking over the world. The arms race and the space race transformed these visions of the future into real computers. Previously large, unreliable and stupid machines were transformed into compact, extremely efficient and smart machines. They were also becoming cheap enough to appear in a wide variety of industries, bringing them into contact with a great many movie goers. In the movies however, computers are shown not as mere tools of mankind, capable of doing mind-numbingly boring tasks quickly and accurately. Everything always has to be larger than life in the film business and so the most popular movie computers were shown as having intelligences at least equal to, if not far in excess of, that possesed by their human creators. But having equal intelligence doesn't mean that computers act identically to humans. They start from different points and progress in different ways and for different purposes. And nothing has portrayed more chillingly the genuinely alien potential of artificially intelligent computers than 2001 - A Space Odyssey. Arthur C. Clarke's short stories lead him to write 2001. The computer villain he created, namely H.A.L, was a scit on I.B.M. H.A.L was the best computer in the world and he even had a wet soothing voice. It had been developed by a binary mimicking of human speech and thought development. The result was a machine that could think. Quite obviously it can pass the famous Turning Test (named after Dr.Alan Turning) which says that if you can hold a conversation with a computer, and not be able to distinguish the replies from those of a human conversationalist, then to all intents and purposes the computer is thinking. Yet H.A.L is a long way off being human. He is given more imformation about the monolith than Frank Bowman and the rest of the crew become worried and discuss switching H.A.L off. Just as a threatened human would do, H.A.L systematically kills them.........." But what does this have to do with AMOS, I hear you cry? Find out next time when we introduce some Artificial Intelligence routines.