AI (artificial intelligence) as the ultimate enhancer of protocol design
Donald Cohen, John P. Finnegan · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1987
Most computer-communication protocols do not use the available resources very efficiently. For example, they pay expensive performance penalties in order to achieve reliable connections. This paper demonstrates how standard artificial-intelligence techniques applied to message transmission can result in vast improvements by making those mechanisms smart. Such an Expert System, coupled with various heuristics common in the communication domain, yields high-performance reliable connections for message interchange. This protocol is the first serious use of AI techniques to result in significant and substantial improvement of communication technology. The protocol is designed to maximize the well known CIQ - Communication Intelligence Quotient -- function. The CIQ is defined as the radio of the amount of information conveyed by a communication transaction (e.g., a message) and the amount of resources consumed in successfully communicating it. The new protocol is called HighQ, because it is designed to achieve a very high CIQ in message communication. The authors start by defining CIQ, the objective function that we wish to optimize. Then it is shown how conventional optimization techniques provide slight benefit the really large gains require sophisticated AI techniques and their use drastically minimizes the transmission cost, even eliminating it in some cases.