page_title: The Age of Intelligent Machines
section_title: Chess and pattern recognition
hierarchical_section_title: The Age of Intelligent Machines / Content / Chess and pattern recognition
caption_attribution_description: English: Go board, at a Go-weekend, Hoge Rielen, Belgium
context_page_description: The Age of Intelligent Machines is a non-fiction book about artificial intelligence by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. This was his first book and the Association of American Publishers named it the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990. It was reviewed in The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor. The format is a combination of monograph and anthology with contributed essays by artificial intelligence experts such as Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, and Marvin Minsky.
  Kurzweil surveys the philosophical, mathematical and technological roots of artificial intelligence, starting with the assumption that a sufficiently advanced computer program could exhibit human-level intelligence. Kurzweil argues the creation of humans through evolution suggests that humans should be able to build something more intelligent than themselves. He believes pattern recognition, as demonstrated by vision, and knowledge representation, as seen in language, are two key components of intelligence. Kurzweil details how quickly computers are advancing in each domain.
context_section_description: Kurzweil discusses how computers play chess in detail, building to his prediction that "we will see a [computer] world champion by the year 2000". The Chinese strategy game of go, however, has proven much more difficult for computers to play well. He considers go to be a "level 3" problem, the type of problem where there is no single unifying formula which solves it. Then Kurzweil reveals that pattern recognition, which is crucial to artificial intelligence, is also a level 3 problem.
  Kurzweil traces various ways of doing pattern recognition, from the rise and fall of perceptrons to random neural nets and decision trees, finally explaining that intelligence is a hierarchy of heterogeneous processes "communicating and influencing each other". He believes Marvin Minsky's society of mind and Jerome Lettvin's society of neurons are useful models. Kurzweil differentiates logical thinking from pattern recognition, and explains that AI has had much more trouble with pattern recognition, exemplified by efforts to create artificial vision.
  Kurzweil estimates that the human vision system does the equivalent of 100 trillion multiplications per second where "a typical personal computer" of the day could only do 100,000 multiplications per second. The way out of this dilemma is parallel processing, having millions or billions of simultaneous processes all computing at the same time, something Kurzweil felt would happen in the future. Kurzweil also discusses speech recognition, which like vision requires complex pattern recognition.
caption: It is much harder to program computers to play the Chinese game of go than it is chess.
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