Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!usc!ucsd!nosc!crash!ncr-sd!se-sd!jim
From: jim@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Jim Ruehlin, Cognitologist domesticus)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: What AI is exactly.
Message-ID: <3850@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: 13 Sep 90 22:16:14 GMT
References: <11770@accuvax.nwu.edu> <387@tygra.UUCP>
Organization: NCR Corporation, Systems Engineering - San Diego
Lines: 35

In article <387@tygra.UUCP> dave@tygra.UUCP (David Conrad) writes:
>And I defy anyone to deny that the kitten who has figured out how to get
>my attention by attacking my legs isn't 'learning'.  It has also been
>working on the "cat flap" problem and improving greatly its strategems
>for play-fighting with the resident adult cat.
>(This isn't a response to Richard Lynch, but to someone else on
>the net who denied that cats actually learn, as such.)

Gee, I wrote about a number of points in my previous posting, but everyone
seems to jump on my statement about cats!  OK, I'll give it a shot...

My basis for saying cats (that particular pet is just an example - I don't
have anything out for cats!) can't learn is that just because it exhibits
behaviour that LOOKS like learning, that doesn't NECESSARILY mean that it
is learning.  There's a lot of anti-behaviourist people in the AI field,
but lots of them will say that as long as the behaviour exists, then the
phenomenon exists.

There's lots we don't know about how humans think.  Even less about how
cats think.  We can say humans learn, but there are other explainations
for the behaviour that cats display, such as a modification to a stimulus
based on the hope/expectation of being fed.

>Cats acquire data, remember past situations, and heuristically improve
>on their responses to similar situations.  Or appear to.  Everything
>they do certainly isn't hardcoded in their DNA.  They respond adaptively,
>or at least differently, to repeated 'inputs' (or previously encountered
>situations).  IMHO.

I've seen examples of this, but also counter examples.  We used to have
a cat we called the "Artichoke Cat", because her level of cognition was
roughly equivalent to that very vegetable.  This thing couldn't modifiy
her behaviour if her life depended on it!

- Jim Ruehlin