Book details of 'Artificial Minds'

Title	Artificial Minds
Author(s)	Stan Franklin
ISBN	0262061783
Language	English
Published	July 1995
Publisher	MIT Press

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Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
An encyclopedic but nonetheless compellingly readable overview of the history of Artificial Intelligence. It doesn't require a computer background in artificial intelligence, but it doesn't insult your natural intelligence either. There may be better books on the subject, but I found this to be just the right mixture of history, theory, cognitive psychology, evolutionary epistemology, and computer science.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
In the beginning, Franklin promises us a new paradigm for artificial intelligence (AI). When he finally gets around to explicating the concept, in the last chapter, I realized that he had foreshadowed it in the body of the book--and I didn't recognize it as a world view. It boils down to seven assertions made about artificial intelligence. When stated baldly, my reaction to the statements is a definite, "Well, maybe," and the proposed paradigm falls squarely into the behaviorist camp. Most of the book is a "once over, lightly" look at various aspects of, and topics related to, artificial intelligence. We look at the mind-body problem, animal minds, symbolic AI, the question of whether machines can think, connectionism (intelligence as a function of a collection of discrete units), neural networks, evolution and genetic programming, artificial life, connectionism and contradiction with a given "mind", initiation of action, perception, memory, representation, and the future. Some of these chapters are interesting surveys of research in the field; others are rather muddled philosophical excursions. (The muddle is not helped by Franklin's tendency to start using a term or acronym before it has been defined.) Specific sections do not get deeply enough into details to be more than superficial restatements of truisms, as the pieces on Turing and Godel demonstrate. We used to, and sometimes still, say that AI was further from reaching its goals than it was a few decades ago. While progress has been made (as I write this, Kasparof and Deep Blue are tied at a win each and two draws, in the second world cup chess challenge), frustrations remain. What is certainly true is that the literature in the field is improving at the same glacial pace. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1997
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Book description:

Recent decades have produced a blossoming of research in artificial systems that exhibit important properties of mind. But what exactly is this dramatic new work and how does it change the way we think about the mind, or even about who or what has mind? Stan Franklin is the perfect tour guide through the contemporary interdisciplinary matrix of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, artificial neural networks, artificial life, and robotics that is producing a new paradigm of mind. Leisurely and informal, but always informed, his tour touches on all of the major facets of mechanisms of mind. Along the way, Franklin makes the case for a perspective that rejects a rigid distinction between mind and non-mind in favor of a continuum from less to more mind, and for the role of mind as a control structure with the essential task of choosing the next action. Selected stops include the best of the work in these different fields, with the key concepts and results explained in just enough detail to allow readers to decide for themselves why the work is significant. Major attractions include animal minds, Allan Newell's SOAR, the three Artificial Intelligence debates, John Holland's genetic algorithms, Wilson's Animat, Brooks' subsumption architecture, Jackson's pandemonium theory, Ornstein's multimind, Marvin Minsky's society of mind, Pattie Maes's behavior networks, Gerald Edelman's neural Darwinism, Drescher's schema mechanisms, Pentti Kanerva's sparse distributed memory, Douglas Hofstadter and Melanie Mitchell's Copycat, and Agre and Chapman's deictic representations. A Bradford Book