AI-complete

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In the field of artificial intelligence, the most difficult problems are

informally known as AI-complete or AI-hard, implying that the difficulty of these
computational problems is equivalent to solving the central artificial
intelligence problem�making computers as intelligent as people, or strong AI.

The term was coined by Fanya Montalvo by analogy with NP-complete and NP-hard in
complexity theory, which formally describes the most famous class of difficult
problems. (Mallery 1988) Early uses of the term are in Erik Mueller's 1987 Ph.D.
dissertation and in Eric Raymond's 1991 jargon file.

To call a problem AI-complete reflects an attitude that it won't be solved by a

simple algorithm, such as those used in ELIZA. Such problems are hypothesised to
include:

* Computer vision (and subproblems such as object recognition)

* Natural language understanding (and subproblems such as text mining and
machine translation)
* Dealing with unexpected circumstances while solving any real world problem,
whether it's navigation or planning or even the kind of reasoning done by expert
systems.

Contents
[hide]

* 1 Examples
* 2 Formalisation
o 2.1 Results
* 3 See also
* 4 References

[edit] Examples

For example, consider a straight-forward, limited and specific task: machine

translation. To translate accurately, a machine must be able to understand the
text. It must be able to follow the author's argument, so it must have some
ability to reason. It must have extensive world knowledge so that it knows what is
being discussed � it must at least be familiar with all the same commonsense facts
that the average human translator knows. Some of this knowledge is in the form of
facts that can be explicitly represented, but some knowledge is unconscious and
closely tied to the human body: for example, the machine may need to understand
how an ocean makes one feel to accurately translate a specific metaphor in the
text. It must also model the authors' goals, intentions, and emotional states to
accurately reproduce them in a new language. In short, the machine is required to
have wide variety of human intellectual skills, including reason, commonsense
knowledge and the intuitions that underly motion and manipulation, perception, and
social intelligence. Machine translation, therefore, is believed to be AI-
complete: it may require strong AI to be done as well as humans can do it.

AI systems can solve very simple restricted versions of AI-complete problems, but
never in their full generality. When AI researchers attempt to "scale up" their
systems to handle more complicated, real world situations, the programs tend to
become excessively brittle without commonsense knowledge or a rudimentary
understanding of the situation: they fail as unexpected circumstances begin to
appear. When human beings are dealing with the world, they are helped immensely by
the fact that they know what to expect: they know what all things around them are,
why they are there, what they are likely to do and so on. They can recognize
unusual situations and adjust accordingly. A machine without strong AI has no
other skills to fall back on. (Lenat & Guha 1989, pp. 1-5)

[edit] Formalisation

Computational complexity theory deals with the relative computational difficulty

of computable functions. By definition it does not cover problems whose solution
are unknown or have not been characterised formally. Since many AI problems have
no formalisation yet, conventional complexity theory does not allow the definition
of AI-completeness.

To address this problem, a complexity theory for AI has been proposed.[1] It is

based on a model of computation that splits the computational burden between a
computer and a human: one part is solved by computer and the other part solved by
human. This is formalised by a human-assisted Turing machine. The formalisation
defines algorithm complexity, problem complexity and reducibility which in turn
allows equivalence classes to be defined.

The complexity of executing an algorithm with a human-assisted Turing machine is

given by a pair:

\langle\Phi_{H},\Phi_{M}\rangle

where the first element represents the complexity of the human's part and the
second element is the complexity of the machine's part.

[edit] Results

The complexity of solving the following problems with a human-assisted Turing

machine is:[2]

* Optical character recognition for printed text: \langle O(1), poly(n)

\rangle
* Turing test:
o for an n-sentence conversation where the oracle remembers the
conversation history (persistent oracle): \langle O(n), O(n) \rangle
o for an n-sentence conversation where the conversation history must be
retransmitted: \langle O(n), O(n^2) \rangle
o for an n-sentence conversation where the conversation history must be
retransmitted and the person takes linear time to read the query\langle O(n^2),
O(n^2) \rangle
* ESP game: \langle O(n), O(n) \rangle
* Image labelling (based on the Arthur-Merlin protocol): \langle O(n), O(n)
\rangle
* Image classification: human only: \langle O(n), O(n) \rangle , and with less
reliance on the human: \langle O(\log n), O(n \log n) \rangle .

[edit] See also

* ASR-complete
* List of open problems in computer science

[edit] References

1. ^ Dafna Shahaf and Eyal Amir (2007) Towards a theory of AI completeness.

Commonsense 2007, 8th International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of
Commonsense Reasoning.[http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~eyal/papers/ai-complete-
commonsense07.pdf ]
2. ^ Dafna Shahaf and Eyal Amir (2007) Towards a theory of AI completeness.
Commonsense 2007, 8th International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of
Commonsense Reasoning.[http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~eyal/papers/ai-complete-
commonsense07.pdf ]

* Engels, Robert & Bremdal, Bernt (2000, July 28). Information Extraction:
State-of-the-Art Report.
* Lenat, Douglas & Guha, R. V. (1989), Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems,
Addison-Wesley
* Mallery, John C. (1988), "Thinking About Foreign Policy: Finding an
Appropriate Role for Artificially Intelligent Computers", The 1988 Annual Meeting
of the International Studies Association., St. Louis, MO,
<http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/mallery88thinking.html> .
* Mueller, Erik T. (1987, March). Daydreaming and Computation (Technical
Report CSD-870017) Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.
("Daydreaming is but one more AI-complete problem: if we could solve any one
artificial intelligence problem, we could solve all the others", p. 302)
* Raymond, Eric S. (1991, March 22). Jargon File Version 2.8.1 (Definition of
"AI-complete" first added to jargon file.)
* Shapiro, Stuart C. (1992). Artificial Intelligence In Stuart C. Shapiro
(Ed.), Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence (Second Edition, pp. 54-57). New
York: John Wiley. (Section 4 is on "AI-Complete Tasks".)