Artificial Intelligence

[Adrian Otto]

Team,

I think that for Publicity reasons we should back away from the term
"Bayesian Spam Filter" and consider something more like "Artificially
Intelligent Spam Filter". This is why:

1) We want bogofilter to become as popular as possible. Most of the world
does not know what "Bayesian" means. Most college graduates, for that matter
don't know what it means. Almost everyone knows what "Artificial
Intelligence" is. With a more understandable description, it should become
popular more rapidly.

2) Bogofilter really isn't that Bayesian anyway. It's close, but as several
experts have pointed out, not exactly Bayesian.

3) Microsoft holds a patent for a Bayesian spam filtering system. Although
bogofilter does not fall under the terms of this patent, the argument would
be much more simple if we simply did not use the word "Bayesian" to describe
the system.

This suggestions begs the question...

What is Artificial Intelligence?
Check out this article for some answers:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/whatisai.html

My assertion is that a system is artificially intelligent if you can train
it to make human-like decisions for you. That's exactly what bogofilter is
for. It's a tool we use to filtering our SPAM messages so that we don't have
to. When bogofilter gets things wrong, we train it with our feedback, and it
learns how to do it better next time.

According to the experts, bogofilter is not exactly "Artificially
Intelligent" either, but I think it's a more suitable match for casual
abstraction.

Comments?

Adrian


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