Challenge Problems for Artiicial Intelligence

AI textbooks and papers often discuss the big ques tions such as how to reason with uncertainty how to reason e ciently or how to improve performance through learning It is more di cult however to nd descriptions of concrete problems or challenges that are still ambitious and interesting yet not so open ended The goal of this panel is to formulate a set of such challenge problems for the eld Each panelist was asked to formulate one or more challenges The em phasis is on problems for which there is a good chance that they will be resolved within the next ve to ten years A good example of the potential bene t of a con crete AI challenge problem is the recent success of Deep Blue Deep Blue is the result of a research e ort fo cused on a single problem develop a program to defeat the world chess champion Although Deep Blue has not yet quite achieved this goal it played a remark ably strong game against Kasparov in the recent ACM Chess Challenge Match A key lesson we learn from Deep Blue s strength is that e cient brute force search can be much more ef fective than sophisticated heuristically guided search In fact brute force was so successful that it led Kas parov to exclaim I could feel I could smell a new