Making AI Dumber, but Smarter

There always seems to be an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system in almost every science fiction novel and film. Whether they are spaceship autopilots or simply pets that never die, AI in our imaginations are advanced and holds lots of data in what they need to perform. This goes the same for current society; today's society is focused on making everyday technology, such as our phones and TV's, smarter by incorporating some kind of AI that can do the things one wants without that person having to do anything that strains the mind. Though today's society wants to make AI smarter, better, and faster, some want AI to adapt to new situations, and to learn about new advancements in today's technology to improve society, or to learn from the past and prevent past mistakes from being repeating in society. For researchers at the University of Gothenburg, they created a program called O* that actually learns. The program starts from a simple set of broad definitions to form a general cognitive model, and builds knowledge based on previous knowledge, drawing new conclusions about the world. This process is similar to how children learn: through logical reasoning. This logical reasoning the program uses can be used in many other areas, such as English, rather than pure math. The logical reasoning, and its name, is based on the principle of Occam's razor: one often favors short and simple explanations, and combines patterns in these explanations and combines them with prior knowledge to solve a problem. O* manages to learn arithmetic from scratch and can deduce logic problems much like an average adult. With this program, the researchers hope that their program will learn and find correct conclusions with reasoning so that programmers do not need to create an algorithm for it to find the correct conclusion, but the program will need many years of development before it is seen in today's society. To see more about O*, follow this link:http://www.gizmag.com/artificial-intelligence-program-imitates-child-cognitive-development/33972/