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From: markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Pseudo-machine
Message-ID: <12221@uwm.edu>
Date: 18 May 91 02:57:53 GMT
References: <5329@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov>
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In article <5329@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> jones@amarna.gsfc.nasa.gov writes:
(The look-up table language processor)
>The question now arises: Is this entity intelligent?  
>
>I claim that we have a pseudo-issue and a pseudo-question.  The reason is
>that you could convert all of the  matter in the Universe into memory
>for such a device, without having nearly enough.  Thus the existence of
>such a device would be radically impossible.

Not so.  Almost all the information is redundant, hence a suitable compression
algorithm exists to compact all that information into a space smaller than the
human brain (which our brain is proof of).

This algorithm will convert the set of all utterable sentences into a grammar
(suspiciously similar to one posited for human speakers for some strange
reason :)), and extract information using an extremely sophisticated 
decompression/retrieval algorithm on this grammar.

Using grammars, incidentally, gives you the ability to store an infinite
amount of information in finite space.  The size of the Universe is thus clearly
no obstacle.

The whole process itself, almost by definition, constitutes an intelligent
algorithm!

One thing you correctly note: it would be impossible to do the task otherwise!
Your point actually completes the argument to the effect that ANY mechanism
capable of storing the entire corpus of human utterances must be intelligent
SOLELY on account of the intelligence NECESSARILY inherent in any storage and
retrieval algorithm capable of handling a database larger in (redundant)
capacity than the entire Universe.