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From: dmark@acsu.buffalo.edu (David Mark)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: What AI is exactly.
Message-ID: <35282@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 8 Sep 90 16:13:33 GMT
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In article <3815@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> jim@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Jim Ruehlin, Cognitologist domesticus) writes:

  [90 lines deleted]
>
>Umm, a cat can't reason, or learn in any human sense.  ...
                                      ^^^
Hope you are not offended, Jim, but I think this claim is just plain silly.
Cats, and other mammals, and birds, and indeed even many invertebrates,
DO learn things!  I remember an article in SCIENCE a few years back that
showed that the time required for a butterfly to insert its proboscis into
the nectaries of a flower decreases with number of trials.  That
is "learning", isn't it?   And it is A type of learning that humans
undoubtedly exhibit.  Thus the "any" in the above quote seems inappropriate.
(Anyone test a human on time needed to, say, thread a needle?)  Yet I don't
think I would want to claim that butterflies are "intelligent" in a realistic
sense.  

But, by my everyday definition of "intelligence", cats and crows and many
other birds and mammals certainly have it.  Their "intelligence" does not
seem to be as elaborate or as developed as ours.  But they do "learn", and 
"remember" (experiments with food caching and re-finding in birds; I
can find references if you want), and "solve problems" (parrot pulling string
"foot over beak" to raise food to its perch), and even "form generalizations".
For the latter, I was told of an appartment-raised cat whose owner moved to
a house with a front door and a back door.  Initially, the cat would "ask" to 
go out one of the doors, and if it was raining, it would retreat and then "ask"
at the other door.  But within a few days, the cat, when seeing rain at one
door, would NOT attempt the other.  It seems obvious that the cat
had "generalized" that rain out one door meant rain out the other, 
or had "learned" that the two doors connect to the "same real world."
And as for communication, many animal species have fairly elaborate
vocal and behavioral methods for "communicating".  And the experiments with
signing apes, even if interpreted rather enthusiastically by the authors,
seem to indicate abilities at fairly complex communication for these
creatures.

It seems to me that human "intelligence" differs from the "intelligence"
of other vertebrates in degree rather than kind.  (I agree that the
degree is VERY large in most cases.)  Is there any "EVIDENCE"
that humans have "kinds" of "intelligence" that no other species
exhibits even to a primitive degree?  (By the usual standards of science,
I would guess that solid "evidence" either way would be pretty hard to 
come by.)

And finally, is the domain or goal of "Artificial Intelligence" really
"Artificial HUMAN Intelligence" ?  Or do folks mostly want to claim that
"Artificial Human Intelligence" is redundant, that "intelligence" is
a strictly-human trait?  And if so, is it strictly-human BY DEFINITION? 
And if so, what do we want to call the collective set of cognitive
abilities to "learn", "communicate", "solve problems", etc., that many
"higher" vertebrates seem to possess?

David Mark
dmark@acsu.buffalo.edu