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From: smiller@aio.jsc.nasa.gov (Stephen Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Testing Intelligence (Re: Turing Test).
Message-ID: <717@aio.jsc.nasa.gov>
Date: 10 Dec 90 20:38:34 GMT
References: <4832@gara.une.oz.au> <GREENBA.90Nov30092227@gambia.crd.ge.com> <1990Nov30.180650.26648@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <GREENBA.90Nov30154938@gambia.crd.ge.com> <1990Dec1.020816.1372@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <GREENBA.90Dec3091624@gambia.crd.ge.com> <1990Dec3 <GRE
Reply-To: smiller@aio.jsc.nasa.gov.UUCP (Stephen Miller)
Organization: NASA JSC Houston, TX
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In article <GREENBA.90Dec5101155@gambia.crd.ge.com> greenba@gambia.crd.ge.com (ben a green) writes:
>In article <YAMAUCHI.90Dec4140917@heron.cs.rochester.edu> yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) quotes me
>      language in its learning. The limitation to humans follows from the fact
>      that only humans have highly developed languages.
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

To fill you in:  whales and dolphins have highly developed languages.  Active
research has been ongoing for the last fifteen years.  In fact, the languages
are so complex and alien that we have not yet cracked them.  That means we 
cannot understand what they are talking about, but we know they are talking. 
    This is not the case with other mammals (such as the wolf or chimp) which
are highly developed socially as well.  (As humans and sea mammals and other 
primates are.)  Wolves and chimps do have language -- in the case of wolves,
the vocabulary is less than fifty concepts.  We have "cracked" this language
because it is a simple one, and we can guess some of the animals' concerns
in life, such as food, danger, communication about social relationships and
hierarchies, and so on.  The sea mammals' world and concerns, however, are
alien to us, which obviously makes the decryption job much more difficult.
However, there is another factor which is making the decoding extremely 
difficult, and that is that these animals are highly developed, with social
relationships equal or superior to ours in complexity and depth, possibly
greater intelligence than ours, and (again) the world so alien to ours that 
we have an extremely hard time imagining it.  
    Understanding these creatures, and their language, is really a problem
closest to understanding an extraterrestrial intelligent life form.

.steve.
*** The opinions and ideas expressed herein in no way reflect those of my
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