Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdatirv!sarima
From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: What AI is exactly.
Message-ID: <151@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 21 Sep 90 15:44:02 GMT
References: <1990Sep10.140437.19913@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu> <3852@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <1990Sep14.172527.16601@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu> <3874@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 25

In article <3874@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> jim@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Jim Ruehlin, Cognitologist domesticus) writes:
>Good point.  I appologize for my comment.
{stuff deleted}
>So here's a quick, informal summary:
>	Learning:  An ability to acquire information and apply it
>		to a variety of situations and circumstances.  This
>		includes applying the information to areas that are
>		unrelated to the original domain.

Well, I now understand where your coming from.  By *this* definition I must
agree there are very few, if any, animals other than humans which display this
sort of learning.  Perhaps some of the great apes do, but even the porpoise
(otherwise more intelligent than a chimp) does not seem capable of cross-over
learning.

However, I think this may be too restrictive to be useful.  It seems to require
a very sophisticated conceptual framework to operate.  Indeed it seems to be
very specialized, since other animals that *can* reason, cannot apply lessons
across problem domain boundries.  I would thus include this type of behavior
as a special case of reasoning, rather than linking it to learning.  [Or I
might place it in a seperate category of its own, perhaps called 'creativity'].
In short, I do not see it as useful to make learning depend on reasoning by
definition - I would rather keep them clearly and fully seperated [i.e. they
should be atomic concepts].
[BTW the simpler definition is also more easily measured]