Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aipna!cam From: cam@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Searle's Chinese Room Message-ID: <3490@aipna.ed.ac.uk> Date: 13 Nov 90 23:49:56 GMT References: <7014@castle.ed.ac.uk> <16197@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <3952@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <57@tdatirv.UUCP> Reply-To: cam@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) Organization: Dept of AI, Edinburgh University, UK. Lines: 25 In article <57@tdatirv.UUCP> sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) writes: >My main problem with AI as a field is that I think most research is >approaching the problem bass-ackwards. Too much time is being spent on >finding 'reliable' reasoning paradigms for artificially contrained, >highly unnatural domains. This is *not* how natural intelligence works. I agree. Most AI research has been doing this. But not all. Moravec suggested in "Locomotion, Vision, and Intelligence", in Robotics Research 1, eds Brady and Paul, MIT Press, 1984 that "... the most fruitful direction for this track [the development of artificial intelligence] is along the oxtrail forged by natural evolution before stumbling on us ... developing a responsive mobile entity ...". And there are some (e.g. Minsky) who were never much taken with the logical approach. Six years on there's quite an entertainingly active research field. Not to mention the confectionists YAWNs (Yet Another Wonderful Network) and sundry other PDP approaches of various granularities. The big money and the textbooks are still pushing Liebniz's dream of finding the calculus of thought, but there's also a lot of diverse research programmes which say, like you, that "is *not* how natural intelligence works". -- Chris Malcolm cam@uk.ac.ed.aipna 031 667 1011 x2550 Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK