Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!minsky
From: minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Intelligence in Science?
Keywords: Sparseness_Theory
Message-ID: <3617@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 7 Oct 90 19:38:20 GMT
References: <1990Sep29.213139.2876@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <1990Oct3.183522.17076@riacs.edu> <3549@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <1990Oct4.175806.7711@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <1990Oct7.192212.24550@math.lsa.umich.edu>
Reply-To: minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 23

In article <1990Oct7.192212.24550@math.lsa.umich.edu> jjewett@math.lsa.umich.edu (Jim Jewett) writes:

>|> In article <3549@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
>minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
 
  >>(Minsky) ...in an essay of mine --- "Communication with Alien
   Intelligence," (is) a cute theory based on some experiments 
   with very small Turing machines.  It turned out that many of them
   performed operations that could be interpreted as elementary
   addition -- while none of them did anything that was "similar" to
   addition but not exactly addition!  

>How do you define "similar" to? Do you mean any associative property 
>with inverses and an identity? ny accumlator?  It seems that there 
>will be no woman similar to Mom because we known Mom so well ... but 
>someone for whom she isn't the point of reference may very well see 
>her as similar to her sister.  

Consider reading the paper. By "similar" I meant commonsensical things
-- like could there be anything like the integers except skipping the
number 5?  Or could there be a number system with the symmetry laws
holding usually but not always.  Or integers with tree signs, instead
of two, etc.