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From: sme@ivax.doc.ic.ac.uk (Steve M Easterbrook)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: AI and Hypertext
Keywords: Intelligent Information Retrieval
Message-ID: <964@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Jul 89 12:17:44 GMT
References: <20607@bikini.cis.ufl.EDU>
Sender: news@doc.ic.ac.uk
Reply-To: sme@doc.ic.ac.uk (Steve M Easterbrook)
Organization: Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK.
Lines: 25

In article <20607@bikini.cis.ufl.EDU> hwb@beach.cis.ufl.edu () writes:
>
>What does hypertext have to do with AI?
>
The answer seems to be that the two fields are radically different approaches
to the use of computers to assist human thought.
The AI field attempts to model intelligence, and so
produce a machine that can assist people by doing [some of] the thinking.
On the other hand hypertext systems do not allow the machine to 'understand'
the information it is storing, but rather assist by allowing one to clarify
and organise one's thoughts. They attempt this by doing the clerical
information-retrieval type jobs, but in a more natural (associative) way.

Incidently, systems that simply offer browsing of someone else's
hardwired associative net are not true hypertext. The ability
to modify, by adding one's own notes and associations (links), would
be required to call it a real hypertext system.

There is plenty of scope for cross-fertilisation of ideas between the two
fields, as both approaches are valuable. I can see a relationship between
semantic nets and hypertext networks, and maybe if the machine was able
to reason about the content and context of the hypertext nodes this would
be a useful advance.

Steve