Algorithmic, sad consequence of the wrong postulate that computer is stupid. Let’s find who benefits from the crime.

1. What is a computer, actually?

Officially, what is a computer? « It’s only a machine able to automatically execute a series of simple operations that it was asked to do. » Here is what tell computer scientists and great thinkers of the computer. A bit dismissive … So, they are obliged to identify all elementary operations that the computer will execute step by step and write them in a program in order to achieve results. This method is called « algorithmic ». It is the opposite of artificial intelligence, which assumes that the machine can and must become intelligent to understand human needs and remove algorithmic programming.

This antagonism between the two visions is old. It dates from early days of computing, in the 1950s . Unfortunately , artificial intelligence has rapidly lost ground to algorithms whose approach was much simpler and could be satisfied with the low power of the first computers. While the artificial intelligence needs power … and  researchers sincerely motivated by this challenge ! Indeed, an intelligent computer does not need computer scientist interpreters and the researchers in computing scientists are computer scientists  … Cornelian ! Precisely, note a strange fact : researchers in artificial intelligence have suddenly disappeared late 1980s, just after one of them had produced the first AI, in secret (Pandora / Intelligence Service, see the first post of this blog). It runs perfectly on the IBM PC of the time. I know that : I bought, used and sold it to large groups and governments.

Why algorithms was so simple? Because its function is to guide a stepper machine in operation, an instinctive and millennium method. Programmable machine is an old invention: from the 18th century in France, programmable looms with punch card were were manufactured industrially. You changed cards  and the machine weaved a new kind of carpet or fabric. This programs storage medium, very convenient and reliable, will be used industrially for computing only  two centuries later, in the 1960s.

2. A program, the suspense kingdom

To become aware of defects of the algorithmic consider a simple example. To tell a robot « walk 10 m », you program as follows: « Look straight ahead, move forward left leg, push the right leg forward then move it one step as soon as the left leg is vertical, leave the left leg go backward, move forward right leg, push the left leg forward then move it one step as soon as the right leg is vertical, leave the right leg go backward. This done, you repeat it 20 times in a row  » (note: to reach 10 meters). The computer controlling the robot will not understand that what it is doing is called « walk » or it simply had 10 meters to go . If you want to do it again walking, along a sidewalk this time , the programmer must reinvent the entire sequence of movements.

The human who reads this program understands the robot must walk straight ahead but does not understand there is a goal ten meters away and what is this goal. Because it is not mentioned in the program! He will only understand at the end. Therefore it will have great difficulty in repairing or improving the program.

Not only algorithmic does not inform about his aim but it is unreadable! A program presents itself as a film strip consisting of a succession of still images. Each image has no interest in itself and gives no indication about the film. With or without a projector, it will be necessary to view the photos one after another until the end if we are to understand history. And even then! For this exercise you must have an excellent memory to see the evolution of the story! Conversely, a few text lines about the film inform what there is in it, without any effort of memory. In a program, it is exactly the same problem: each line is a still image giving an order to the machine. It is inordinately long to read and can allow to understand the role of the program only by reading until the end.

Computer scientists have ennobled the algorithmic, so their activity, finding it a founding father : Alan Turing, their God, who in my opinion actually did invent nothing. This man described in 1936 the ideal « mechanical procedure » for piloting a machine. The computer did not exist so it did not aim computing as they claim. More annoying, his « brilliant » concept was that looms used two centuries earlier in France with punch cards: a card per action.

You will recognize below an algorithm such as Wikipedia shows : like a roll of film.

A program, the suspense kingdom …

And here are the punch cards of the Jacquard loom, to be read and executed one by one as the Turing machine :

 

3. The true brilliant founder of computer and artificial intelligence: George Boole

The real computer genius is, in my opinion again, George Boole, the English who invented a logical algebra in 1854. Boole showed that with electromagnetic relay, which typically have two states: open or closed (either zero or 1, basis of information in computers!), we can calculate and reason. Today, computers exist only thanks to Boolean algebra, which is installed in all microprocessors. This is the « heart » of the computer. It controls organs and runs programs.

It turns out the « Boolean » contains reasoning  functions our brain uses every second (« Computers and logic are inseparable – right?« ). IF, AND, OR, THEN, ELSE, YES, NO, etc.. The basis of artificial intelligence one century before the first computers. The algorithm found a way to divert this natural intelligence similar to human brain into a tool responsible for stupidly executing orders from the  brain of computer scientists… So, the reasoning mechanism used in Artificial Intelligence is the reprogramming with algorithms of the existing functions natively in the computer! You can imagine the performance!

With algorithms, we walk on the head (French locution). Not with our head …

And yet our programs still work today only with them. Guess who benefits of the crime!

 

Brief History of Artificial Intelligence

Hello all ! I’m a French researcher in Artificial Intelligence who shares his thoughts with you. Please forgive my broken English.

I – Brief history of AI

In the 1970s Artificial Intelligence was a simple concept: it was a computer giving the impression of having a human intelligence. Human intelligence was the ability to reason to solve problems. Ie we call « logic ». The logic is a well known mechanism common to all living beings without which it is absolutely impossible to survive more than a few seconds.

I give you my definition: « Intelligence is a mechanism which reasons on a knowledge to produce a new knowledge ». My research and discoveries for 27 years in AI (Artificial Intelligence) have shown that this simple definition is surely true because,  once the logic automated  we get a computer with intelligent human faculties.

Let’s return to the history of AI. In 1958, at the very beginning of computing, John McCarthy in the United States already proposed to use logic as a language of knowledge representation, ie as a programming language. Instead of algorithmic, the old unnatural and illogical process – always essential today – that requires special languages and therefore specially trained programmers. In the process he invented the term « artificial intelligence » in 1962 and created the first « artificial intelligence » laboratory at Stanford University.

In 1983, another American, Edward Feigenbaum, also Turing Award (the American Nobel prize of computing) dreamed in a book about what artificial intelligence must be: « The machines will have reasoning power: they will automatically engineer vast amounts of knowledge to serve whatever purpose humans propose, from medical diagnosis to product design, from management decisions to education. « , »The reasoning animal has, perhaps inevitably, fashioned the reasoning machine », »Often the reasoning power of these machines matches or exceeds the reasoning power of the humans who intructed them and, in some cases, the reasoning power of any human performing such tasks ».

We can say that AI was carefully defined in the minds of American researchers! It was a reasoning on knowledge by computers that give them superior capabilities to those of humans.

In fact, U.S. researchers talk a lot in the media but don’t act much in their labs! They make no achievement in the field of automation of logic. Indeed, they lack … of intelligence. MacCarthy creates in 1958 a language supposedly IA absolutely abstruse: LISP, which simply shows that he did not understand what human intelligence is. However it has a hit with computer scientists, known to love intellectual challenges as long as there algorithmic inside. These are the French who, during that time, approach a true AI in silence.

In 1972 , two French , Alain and Philippe Roussel Colmerauer , create Prolog , the first reasoning computer language. It is a so rustic reasoning that it does not produce much and needs to be used by the computer scientists. But the success is immediate in the global computer science community who, as you know, likes intellectual challenges as long as there are algorithms inside ! During the 1980s the Japanese, who are sinking under gold, discovered in an American university « a photocopy of a photocopy » saying that Prolog is THE artificial intelligence language. In 1990 they invest billions of yen in a  » fifth generation computer  » which will speak Prolog like you and me, so automatically clever, is not it ? A machine that will make obsolete the most sophisticated Western machines. They looted all AI research world and all crammed into a huge computer like you force-feed a goose. In the West, face of such heavy artillery, we die fear ! I’m not kidding , I personally experienced :  » In one year japonese caught 10 years of research and have now only one month behind us  » ( the researcher Mehmet Dincbass returning from Japan where he saw the machine). After ten years, the mammoth project dies without ever produced nothing at all … In fact, there is little intelligence in Prolog. And in the brain of Japanese researchers ( at the time, of course) .

II – 1982-86 : Rise of reasoning AI !

In France again AI finally emerges, in 1982. An unknown researcher, Jean-Louis Laurière (Paris VI) develops « Pandora », a reasoning expert system according to the principles of the syllogism. The syllogism is our everyday logic described there 2400 years ago by Aristotle. That shows just how much that logic is not a joke! It offers critical thinking desired by Minsky. By critical thinking, Minsky probably meant a conscious reasoning can verify it does not deduct nonsense. Ambition a priori out of reach.

Yet Pandora does that critical thinking! It produces deductions, explains his reasoning and … detects contradictions! Thus it displays and critical knowledge that gives it pointing out the reasoning leading to conflicting results. For this program works, it is sufficient that we give him an expert knowledge written in everyday language (in the form of rules). Then he starts to think and diagnose as the expert!

This achievement is so effective that Pandora will be sold as such in the trade in 1986 and 1987, under the name « Intelligence Service ». I will find, buy it and create my first company to sell this gem to businesses. Then in 1986 I invented La Maïeutique, a method which put Intelligence Service-Pandora within the reach of all by automatically extracting unconscious knowledge and introducing it into the expert systems, so that they immediately started working.

Alas, as I tell in this article Jean-Louis Laurière, the man who wanted us to ignore his marvellous invention : reasoning AI, everything was done by computer scientists to make these two magnificent inventions disappear from memory.

III – As a result: 10 years later, AI ​​is failing among our researchers, they do not know even more what it means!

In 2005, I presented my AI to the Association of French Artificial Intelligence (AFIA). This is their first answer: « I know very little about your field » !!!

2nd answer the next day: « AI is a very vague field (…) Finally in AI we can almost put « computing » » !

In fact, French researchers are not real researchers, they are computer scientists civil servants who play with phony projects and never find. They remain in the knowledge they learned at school: algorithmic, procedural, coding by programming languages. It’s stupid, it’s their backyard, don’t touch!

And when I say that they never find, here is a new confession of one of the bosses of Afia, Eunika (pretty name). When I learn that a congress is organized by the French State to present the French AI to politicians, bosses and the press, and grant subsidies to AI research, I ask to be present. Answer of Eunika: « I’m very familiar with your AI background [of finder]. This day is devoted to research. »

So, exit. This AI congress is not open to private researchers who in addition find ! Funds will go to academics who never find, already funded by our taxes.

Sic transit gloria mundi … That’s where the stupidity of this French administration that leads us. The day this oligarchy will not lead us anymore, French people will be the richest in the world!