Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!know!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!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: <3851@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> Date: 13 Sep 90 22:31:41 GMT References: <3543@gara.une.oz.au> <3815@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <35282@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> Organization: NCR Corporation, Systems Engineering - San Diego Lines: 69 In article <35282@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> dmark@acsu.buffalo.edu (David Mark) writes: > [90 lines deleted] >> >>Umm, a cat can't reason, or learn in any human sense. ... 90 lines of info, and they STILL want to talk about cats! Guess y'all agree with the rest of it ... :-) >Hope you are not offended, Jim, but I think this claim is just plain silly. Naw, it takes more than that to offend me. Call my Fender Telecaster silly, THEN I'll be offended! >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? Good question! Looking inside the "black box" called "learning organism", are there low-level cognitive similarities? Or even high-level ones? I doubt it - humans and butterflys are very different. Perhaps the crux of this problem is the definition of "learning" as a purely behavioural one. IMO, learning is more than just displaying certain behaviour. >Thus the "any" in the above quote seems inappropriate. Agreed, if you look merely at the behavioural aspects of learning. Otherwise, maybe there's little similarities between the exhibited behaviour in humans and cats. >But, by my everyday definition of "intelligence", cats and crows and many >other birds and mammals certainly have it. How do you tell? You indicate that there is similar behaviour between the butterfly and mammals, but say the butterfly doesn't have intelligence while the mammals do. You may be right, but the question is: beyond behaviour, what differentiates between the intellegence (learning) and non-intelligence? >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". Is this learning or behaviour designed to acquire food? >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. Agreed. My intention here was to ask if they display "intelligent" communication. Since we haven't detected them talking about epistimology and metaphysics we can't know for sure that these communications are much more than evolved actions. >And finally, is the domain or goal of "Artificial Intelligence" really >"Artificial HUMAN Intelligence" ? We haven't positively located any other species that is intelligent, so we have only ourselves to base creating intelligent systems on. I'm not saying there isn't other intelligent species (to a greater or lesser degree than us), just that we haven't identified them yet. - Jim Ruehlin