Autonomous Systems

purely behavioral criterion for intelli-gence. That is, an artificial device that is able to do things that are assumed to require intelligence when done by a human merits the description intelli-gent even though it is merely a mechanism. Thus, a computer program capable of playing excellent chess would be considered intelligent, even though it succeeds through straightforward, compu-tationally intensive means. The average person is less comfortable with this view. Many would say that a dog or even a worm is intelligent, whereas the chess computer is not, even though a dog, much less a worm, is not capable of anything approaching chess playing. Similarly, the lay person is far more apt to ascribe intelligence and other human The term intelli-gence in the phrase artificial intelligence suggests that intelli-gence is the key characteristic to be analyzed and syn-thesized by the research discipline. However, for many researchers the objective of this dis-cipline is the scien-tific understanding of all aspects of com-plex behavior. For some, this objective might be limited to the traditional goals of scientific psychology: understanding humans. For others, it might include other species and artificial systems. In either case, the enterprise is driven by psy-chological questions because humans are the extreme of the known range of possibility that drives our curiosity. Therefore, we feel that AI is—or ought to be—seeking to under-stand and build fully humanlike systems, not simply problem-solving machines. This arti-cle presumes that the reader is willing to adopt this position for the moment