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From: e343ca@tamuts.tamu.edu (Colin Allen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: What AI is exactly.
Summary: waiting for intelligence
Keywords: evolution intelligence
Message-ID: <8373@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Date: 19 Sep 90 18:27:56 GMT
References: <5907@plains.NoDak.edu> <59525@bbn.BBN.COM> <147@tdatirv.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@helios.TAMU.EDU
Followup-To: colin@snaefell.tamu.edu
Organization: Texas A&M University
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In article <147@tdatirv.UUCP> sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) writes:
>In article <59525@bbn.BBN.COM> BKort@bbn.com (Barry Kort) writes:
>>To my mind, an intelligent system must not only be able to think and solve 
>>problems, it must also be able to learn and evolve over time.  The 
>	Hmm, this is very interesting.  This may actually be a clue to our
>current difficulty in making real progress in AI.  We are trying to add
>learning capacity to existing reasoning systems (called expert systems).
>Evolution appears to have done it the other way around!
> {stuff deleted}
>	Perhaps we should scrap all our nifty, complicated reasoning
>engines and concentrate on designing a program that does nothing *but*
>learn.

The trouble with this proposal is that we don't have a few eons to sit
around and wait for the results while the systems evolve.  The
suggestion might be useful if we knew how to take simple learning
systems modeled on organisms like Aplysia and transform them into
devices capable of conversing in a natural language like English, but
we don't.  Neither is it clear that focusing on simple learning
devices will tell us how to get to the more complicated things.  We
just have to jump right in with the hard stuff.

Colin Allen				e343ca@tamuts.tamu.edu
Department of Philosophy
Texas A&M University			(409) 845-3606
College Station, TX 77843-4237