Open AccessIAAI/AI Magazine 2006 Robert Engelmore Award Address: What Do We Know about Knowledge?
Author(s) -
Buchanan Bruce G.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
ai magazine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.597
H-Index - 79
eISSN - 2371-9621
pISSN - 0738-4602
DOI - 10.1609/aimag.v27i4.1908
Subject(s) - computer science , focus (optics) , simple (philosophy) , knowledge management , knowledge based systems , power (physics) , data science , epistemology , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , optics
Intelligent systems need knowledge. However, the simple equation “knowledge is power” leaves three major questions unanswered. First, what do we mean by “knowledge”; second, what do we mean by “power”; and third, what do we mean by “is”? In this article, I will examine the first of these questions. In particular I will focus on some of the milestones in understanding the nature of knowledge and some of what we have learned from 50 years of AI research. The discipline and detail required to write programs that use knowledge have given us some valuable lessons for implementing the knowledge principle, one of which is to make our programs as flexible as we can.