<P> Kurzweil traces various ways of doing pattern recognition, from the rise and fall of perceptrons to random neural nets and decision trees, finally explaining that intelligence is a hierarchy of heterogeneous processes "communicating and influencing each other". He believes Marvin Minsky's society of mind and Jerome Lettvin's society of neurons are useful models . Kurzweil differentiates logical thinking from pattern recognition, and explains that AI has had much more trouble with pattern recognition, exemplified by efforts to create artificial vision . </P> <P> Kurzweil estimates that the human vision system does the equivalent of 100 trillion multiplications per second where "a typical personal computer" of the day could only do 100,000 multiplications per second . The way out of this dilemma is parallel processing, having millions or billions of simultaneous processes all computing at the same time, something Kurzweil felt would happen in the future . Kurzweil also discusses speech recognition, which like vision requires complex pattern recognition . </P> <P> In addition to pattern recognition, representative knowledge is also an important aspect of intelligence . Kurzweil details several types of expert systems in medicine, insurance and one for garage mechanics . Knowledge is expressed by language and Kurzweil discusses the state of language understanding including projects such as Terry Winograd's SHRDLU . Kurzweil says robotics is where all AI technologies are used: "vision, pattern recognition, knowledge engineering, decision - making, natural - language understanding and others". He explains how robots are increasingly successful in structured environments like factories, and predicts that "effective robotic servants in the home will probably not appear until early next century". </P> <P> As a high school student Kurzweil built a computer which could compose music and demonstrated it on the national TV show I've Got a Secret . In The Age of Intelligent Machines he discusses the relationship between artificial intelligence and the production of music and visual art by computers . He includes the freehand drawings of AARON as well as plotter art by Colette and Charles Bangert . He briefly mentions artificial life, shows a number of computer generated fractals, and writes that "the role of the computer is not to displace human creativity but rather to amplify it ." </P>

Ray kurzweil the age of intelligent machines pdf