Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!rex!feldman
From: feldman@rex.cs.tulane.edu (Damon Feldman)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: AI - the real problem
Message-ID: <6341@rex.cs.tulane.edu>
Date: 26 Feb 91 17:55:21 GMT
References: <1434@ucl-cs.uucp> <5219@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <23176@well.sf.ca.us>
Organization: C.S. Dept, Tulane Univ., New Orleans, LA
Lines: 34

In <23176@well.sf.ca.us> nagle@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) writes:


>      Worrying about the differences between humans and the other mammals
>remains premature, given our grossly inadequate knowledge about how anything
>more complex than a slug really works.  We just don't have the knowledge to
>address the design of a human-level intelligence, given that efforts to
>build even synthetic ant-level intelligences have only been marginally
>successful to date.
	
>     I might be wrong.  Someone might pull off a miracle.  But from
>the bottom up, we don't need a miracle.  Ordinary cleverness will
>suffice.

	Nonsense.  The brain is structured fundamentally differently
from a computer and has capabilities that use this structure to its
maximal advantage (I beleive for a variety of reasons).  Modeling the
brain with a computer is no more feasible than having a human perform
all the tasks of a computer.
	The problems I refer to are things like having 10^10 (or
something like that) connections among neurons.  A computer cannot
keep track of 10^10 little peices of information in the first place,
and if it could, it could not model the interactions that occur among
all of them many times per second.
	The brain has defined certain areas of AI by being good in
them, and cannot be matched by a Von Neumann Machine (or some toy with
a few thousand processors) in these areas.

Just my opinion,
Damon
-- 

Damon Feldman                  feldman@rex.cs.tulane.edu
Computer Science Dept.         Tulane University, New Orleans LA, USA