5. Why is the sentence "Time flies like an arrow" difficult for a computer to parse translate or understand?
Automatic translation was the method that used the parsing program which would analyze sentence structure and identify each word according to whether it was a subject, verb, or other part of speech. The word by word approach failed because without understanding the translation is impossible.
7. What is a knowledge base? What is an expert system? How are the two related?
A knowledge base contains a system of rules of determining and changing the relationship among facts. Facts stored in a database are rigidly organized in categories. An expert system is a software program designed to replicate the decision making process of a human expert.
11. What rules might a computer use to sort the characters shown on page 597 into A's and B's?
Optical character Recognition locates and identifies printed characters embedded in images-it reads text. Much current work in artificial intelligence is focused on neural networks or neural nets-distrubuted, parallel computing systems inspired by the structure of the human brain. For a neaural net to learn to recognize the letter A, it must go through a series of trals in which circuite patterns that produce incorrect guesses are weakened and patterns that produce correct guesses are strengthened.
14. What distinguishes a robot from a desktop computer?
A robot is a computer controlled machine designed to perform specific manual tasks. Robots include output peripherals for manipulating their environments and input sensors that enable them to perform self-correcting actions based on feedback from outside. Robots perform a variety of dangerous and tedious tasks, in some cases, outperforming humans. The most important hardware differences between robots and other computers are the input and output peripherals.
