Fans preserve and emulate Sega’s extremely rare ‘80s “AI computer”
Fans preserve and emulate Sega’s extremely rare ‘80s “AI computer”
arstechnica.com
Fans preserve and emulate Sega’s extremely rare ‘80s “AI computer”
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🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary After all, the usually obsessive documentation over at Sega Retro includes only the barest stub of an information page for the quixotic, education-focused 1986 hardware.
The site's recently posted deep dive on the Sega AI Computer includes an incredible amount of well-documented information on this historical oddity, including ROMs for dozens of previously unpreserved pieces of software that can now be partially run on MAME.
Despite the Japan-only release, the Sega AI Computer's casing includes an English-language message stressing its support for the AI-focused Prolog language and a promise that it will "bring you into the world of artificial intelligence."
Indeed, a 1986 article in Electronics magazine (preserved by SMS Power) describes what sounds like a kind of simple and wholesome early progenitor of today's world of generative AI creations:
Still, it's notable how much effort the community has put in to fill a formerly black hole in our understanding of this corner of Sega history.
SMS Power's write-up of its findings is well worth a full look, as is the site's massive Google Drive, which is filled with documentation, screenshots, photos, contemporaneous articles and ads, and much more.
Saved 51% of original text. :::
17 comments
People now "ChatGPT isn't real AI because it says dumb shit all the time". People then: "Prolog is AI because it can solve logic problems".
Something with moving goalposts or something
They are both different parts of the same problem. Prolog can solve logical problems using symbolism. ChatGPT cannot solve logical problems, but it can approximate human language to an astonishing degree. If we ever create an AI, or what we now call an AGI, it will include elements of both these approaches.
In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, Turing made some really interesting observations about AI ("thinking machines" and "learning machines" as they were called then). It demonstrates stunning foresight:
You can view ChatGPT and Prolog as two ends of the spectrum Turing is describing here. Prolog is "thinking rationally": It is predictable, logical. ChatGPT is "acting humanly": It is an unpredictable, "undisciplined" model but does exhibit very human-like behaviours. We are "quite ignoerant of what is going on inside". Neither approach is enough to achieve AGI, but they are such fundamentally different approaches that it is difficult to conceive of them working together except by some intermediary like Subsumption Architecture.
This is what I expect too. And hope - LLMs are way too unpredictable to control important things on their own.
I often say LLMs are doing for natural language what early computation did for mathematics. There's still plenty of mathy jobs computers can't do, but the really repetitive ones are gone and somewhat forgotten - nobody thinks of "computer" as a title.
yeah, they're really in the wrong to think that we'd have some technical advancement within the last 40 years and we should expect more than a probabilistic text generator. 🙃
The literal first AI was an analog computer that the guy gave feedback to images on. If it's a circle or a square, if it guesses right or wrong.
It's literally the same training that we have used for models ever since and currently, and there are people trying to say Generative Imaging isn't AI.
Y'all. It's the exact thing AI was created in mind for.
Correct. When people say "ChatGPT isn't real AI" they mean it's not AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The term "Artificial Intelligence" has been the proper term for the study of machine learning since the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop.
It's all AI, from the computer player in Battlechess to ChatGPT. It's not all using the same techniques, or have the same capabilities.
That reminds me of the Square Hole Meme.
That is my thought as well. We'll continuously change the definition of intelligence in order to preserve the notion that intelligence is inherently human. Until we can't.