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Artificial Intelligence
Kirby's Korner · June 16, 2000

Only after computers and the networks they connect to become truly intelligent do we mere bags of flesh and blood have to worry for our jobs -- or our lives.

I've been thinking about this recently as I read Douglas R. Hofstadter's 1997 book, Le Ton beau de Marot, a book on translation that gets into the question of what intelligence actually means. Hofstadter won a Pulitzer Prize for Godel, Escher, Bach, published more than 20 years ago, in which he touches on nearly every topic imaginable but emphasizes the need to look at systems at the appropriate level to appreciate what they can provide.

The question of appropriate systems comes up quite often on Ticked.com. Those of us who fly can get angry at gate agents even though they're just following the rules; it is the airline's system that's at fault.

More often, travel agents express concern that Internet booking engines will cost them their jobs because travelers can -- or at least think they can -- use these systems, at a lower cost, to match the services real-world agents provide.

We're not there yet, and we won't be for a while. But there are a few Web sites to watch that provide rudimentary clues about where things might be heading.

Last time I mentioned ITA Software, which has become a darling of travel writers. The service grew out of a student project started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it applies artificial intelligence to the task of searching individual airline databases and the massive Global Distribution Systems the airlines use to communicate with travel agents.

The key advantage from a traveler's point of view is ITA's flexibility. Travelers have a nearly unlimited ability to define what they want to search for. An example CEO Jeremy Wertheimer uses constantly is this: a traveler can tell the system the airport to fly out of or into, but also tell the system he or she will consider any airport within a specified distance -- say, 50 miles -- of the requested airport. ITA takes this into consideration when presenting results.

VacationCoach.com launched this month using the result of expert systems analysis to present leisure travel choices to people who visit the site. Visitors fill out a questionnaire about themselves and their travel desires, and VacationCoach returns a list of Web sites outlining appropriate vacations.

The sites were all chosen by VacationCoach staffers and reside in a database used by the site. But to determine how to respond to specific queries, VacationCoach studied how travel experts answer similar questions. From this study, they developed a set of expert systems rules that VacationCoach computers apply to individual requests.

Yatra combines artificial intelligence and expert systems analysis in a corporate travel management system. Still in beta testing, the site takes a "best practices" approach to expert systems. It expects to tell corporate travel managers how best to set up rules for individual trips and for negotiations to reduce rates paid to airlines, hotels, and car rental companies.

Yatra also sees advantages for the airlines, hotels, and car rental companies and expects to offer them what it calls "fuzzy logic" artificial intelligence systems. The system might, for example, tell an airline that a top-tier traveler from another airline just booked a trip on the first airline, giving that first airline the opportunity to woo over the traveler with excellent customer service.

None of these systems is proven yet, and they may never be. But similar set-ups have been used in other fields -- expert systems for medical diagnoses, artificial intelligence for translating technical journals.

At some point we may deal with them when we want to plan our travel.

David Kirby is the editor of Interactive Travel Report. His column appears on Friday. You can reach him at david@ticked.com.