What are some impressive algorithms or software in the world of AI?

Question

I have always loved the idea of AI and evolutionary algorithms. Unfortunately, as we all know, the field hasn\'t developed nearly as fast as expected in the early days.

Answer 1

One of the most interesting things in AI, for me, is a very old discussion started by Rodney Brooks about his behavioral architecture called subsumption architecture.

He completely abandons all kinds of symbolic representation, and always says: take the world as your model. This saves the robot from generating a wrong world view and all complicated issues in correcting the model.

He published many interesting books and was one of the first persons in the embodied cognition approach that is used a lot in research at the moment.

Interesting reading material can be found on http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/index.html. Some of his later publications get very philosophical, but the earlier descriptions of the robots and how their behavior emerged from a simple set of rules and actions are worth reading.