Monday, July 18, 2005
What AI ideas has Google introduced?
Google not introduced, but practically demonstrated the following ideas:1) Words are the smallest units of intelligent information. Word alone has meaning. Letter alone - doesn't. Google searches for words as a whole. Not for letters of substrings.
2) Phrases are important units of information too. Google underlines importance of phrases by supporting search in quotes, like "test phrase".
3) Natural language (plain text) is the best way to share knowledge between intelligent systems (people and computers).
4) Programming languages that are the best for mainstream programming - the same languages are the best for intelligent system development. LISP, Prolog, and other artificial programming languages are less efficient in intelligence development than mainstream languages like C/C++/C#/VB/: (Google proved this idea by using plain C as a core language for "advanced text manipulation project".
5) Huge knowledge base does matter for intelligence. Google underlines importance of huge knowledge base.
6) Simplicity of knowledge base structure does matter. In comparison with CYC's model, Google's model is relatively simple. Obviously Google is more efficient/intelligent than dead CYC.
7) Intelligent system must collect data automatically (by itself, like in Google's crawler). Intelligent system should not expect to be manually fed by developers (like in CYC).
8) To improve information quality, intelligent system should collect information from different types of sources. Google collects web pages from web, but also it collects information from Google toolbar - about what web pages are popular among users.
9) Constant updates and forgetting keeps intelligent system sane (Google constantly crawls the Web, adds new and deletes dead web-pages from its memory).
10) Links (relations) add intelligence to a knowledge base (Search engines made the Web mode intelligent);
Good links convert knowledge base into intelligent system (Google's index with web work as a very wise adviser (read: intelligent system)).
11) Links must have weights (like in Google's Page rank). These weights must be taken into consideration in decision making.
12) Couple of talented researchers can do far more than lots of money in wrong hands. Think about "'Serge Brin & Larry Page search' vs 'Microsoft's search'".
13) Sharing ideas with public helps research project to come to production. Hiding ideas - kills the project in the cradle. Google is very open about its technology. And very successful.
14) Targeting practical results helps research project a lot. Instead of having "abstract research about search", Google targeted "advanced web-search". Criteria of success of the project were clearly defined. As a result Google project quickly hit production and generated tremendous outcome in many ways.
