Artificial Intelligence Trivia Quiz

Answer: John McCarthy

Tail Gunner Joe is a reference to Senator Joseph McCarthy of McCarthyism fame and hopefully a helpful clue. John McCarthy was no relation to the man. John spent his life in the field of AI and championed mathematical logic as the basis for AI. He is credited with developing the Lisp programming language while at MIT and heavily influenced the ALGOL programming language.

He was a professor in the field at Stanford University from 1962 until his retirement in 2000.

Answer: Dartmouth

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence is considered to be the foundational beginnings of the subject. The term artificial intelligence was first introduced at this conference. The conference was organized by John McCarthy, who was a professor at Dartmouth at the time. Early AI champions and researchers Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon joined him in the proposal offered at the conference.

Other notable attendees were Ray Solomonoff, Oliver Selfridge, Trenchard More, Arthur Samuel, Herbert A. Simon, and Allen Newell.

Answer: Department of Defense

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is the agency within the Department of Defense (DoD) responsible for the development of new technologies that can be exploited by the military. In the 1960s with the Vietnam War raging, DARPA funneled large amounts of money into AI research. With the end of the Vietnam War in the 1970s and the lack of practical applications for AI, the funding eventually dried up for about a decade.

Answer: Shakey the Robot

Shakey the Robot was developed between 1966 and 1972. At the time robots merely followed the step by step instructions given by the programmer or operator. What made Shakey different was it could analyze the command and break it down by itself rather than having to be given step by step instructions.

The project was funded by DARPA. The robots main programming (operating system) was done in Lisp and STRIPS (Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver) was the software it ran to carry out its tasks.

Answer: Lisp programming language

The Lisp programming language was designed by John McCarthy in 1958 and is the second oldest high-level programming language still in use today, Fortran is one year older. There are now dialects within the Lisp language with Common Lisp and Scheme being two of the most widely-known general purpose ones. This language has always been closely linked to and utilized by AI research.

Answer: Garry Kasparov

IBM set out to develop a computer that could beat a world chess champion and so Deep Blue was born. Deep Blue first played Kasparov in 1996, losing 4-2 to him in a six game match. The programs developers went back to work to fine tune the program and continued to use chess Grandmaster Joel Benjamin as their knowledge source. During the rematch in 1997, the programmers were allowed to make adjustments to Deep Blue between matches. Again it was a six game match and going into the sixth and final game it was tied 2 1/2-2 1/2. Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in spectacular fashion in just 19 moves.

The match became a media sensation.

Answer: Ken Jennings

In 2004, IBM Research manager Charles Lickel caught a glimpse of Jennings on TV during his famous run and decided that IBM should develop a computer that could beat him. At first no one wanted to take on the task until finally David Ferrucci stepped up to the challenge.

The biggest problem facing the team was to get Watson to understand questions that were asked in common language in a relatively short amount of time and then to be able to answer those questions. By 2011, Watson was regularly beating "Jeopardy!" champions. That year Watson faced off against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the two biggest winners on "Jeopardy!". Watson won the three game cumulative match handily.

Answer: Water borne

The DARPA Grand Challenge started in 2004 with an off-road competition but no vehicles were able to finish the course that year. In 2005, 5 out of 23 completed the off-road course with Stanford Racing winning. In 2007, the challenge was changed to an urban environment. This time six teams finished the course with Tartan Racing from Carnegie Mellon winning. In 2013 and 2014, humanoid robots will be the featured forms of transport.

In all of these competitions the goal is to get AI to make the vehicles be able to finish the course and so advance the research into the field. Cash prizes are awarded in each competition.

Answer: Expert systems

Expert systems are knowledge based systems that seek to emulate human decision-making processes based on a database and reasoning derived from that knowledge rather than procedures put in place by a develop as happens with conventional programming. In the 1970s and 1980s computer games made vast use of this technology since the game programmer can set parameters upon which the software will base its decisions. Expert systems have moved far beyond just gaming since then and are employed in many fields such as law, medicine, and accounting, to name a few.

The process by which the knowledge needed for a specific application is gathered and employed is called knowledge engineering.

Answer: True

Many challenges still face AI research and one of the biggest is attempting to duplicate human intuition. The problems facing AI research are broken down into about ten sub-problems. These are:
1) Deduction, reasoning, problem solving - of which human intuition is chief
2) Knowledge representation - this is where knowledge engineering plays a large role
3) Planning - being able to make its own plans to accomplish goals without being told
4) Learning - this problem has existed from the beginning
5) Natural language processing - Watson made huge strides in this area
6) Motion and manipulation - robots and AI are closely linked
7) Perception - includes but is not limited to speech recognition, facial recognition and object recognition
8) Social intelligence - much of human communication is nonverbal and this encompasses that
9) Creativity - during Kasparov's 1997 match he attributed a certain move to highly developed intelligence that a programmer later discovered was probably just a random glitch
10) General intelligence - also known as strong AI.