Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!haven!udel!rochester!yamauchi
From: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: An Alternative to Strong and Weak AI (was Re: STRONG AND WEAK AI)
Message-ID: <1989Dec3.185506.22039@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 3 Dec 89 18:55:06 GMT
References: <1698@aipna.ed.ac.uk> <11870@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Organization: University of Rochester Computer Science Department
Lines: 43

In article <11870@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> harnad@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad) writes:
>Chris Malcolm asked for a definition:
>
>Those who believe in Strong AI believe that thinking is computation
>(i.e., symbol manipulation). Those who believe in Weak AI believe that
>computation is a means of studying and testing theories of (among other
>things) thinking, which need not be just computation (i.e., not just
>symbol manipulation).
>
>The typical error of believers in Strong AI is a misconstrual of
>the Church-Turing Thesis: Whereas it may be true that every physical
>process is "equivalent" to symbol manipulation, i.e., is simulable by
>symbol manipulation, it is decidedly NOT true that every physical
>process IS symbol manipulation. Flying, heating and transduction, for
>example, are not. How does one fall into this error? By becoming lost
>in the hermeneutic hall of mirrors created by the semantic
>interpretations we cast onto symbol systems. We forget the difference
>between what is merely INTERPRETABLE as X and what really IS X. We
>confuse the medium with the message.

I think this points out a need for a third class of AI research:
research directed toward building intelligent systems which takes
account of the need for an intelligent system to act in the real world
-- not just think about acting in Blocks World.  For example: the
work of Brooks and Moravec would fall into this category.

This type of research seems to be emerging under a number of different
names, in a number of different fields: behavior-based robotics,
mobile robotics, reactive systems, artificial life, artificial
creatures, cybernetics.

I think the term Artificial Creatures, coined by Rodney Brooks, is the
most descriptive.  Traditional AI deals with high-level cognitive
abilities, Artificial Life deals with abstract populations of
extremely simple organisms, Artificial Creatures deals with building
autonomous organisms which are of intermediate complexity between
amoebas and logicians.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Brian Yamauchi				University of Rochester
yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu		Computer Science Department
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