Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!forbis
From: forbis@milton.u.washington.edu (Gary Forbis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turing Test: opinions on an idea
Message-ID: <1991May21.183443.16682@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 21 May 91 18:34:43 GMT
References: <YcC8CRG00WBM83X4Fq@andrew.cmu.edu> <1991May21.155325.17797@cs.yale.edu> <1991May21.175359.26377@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 38

"Butter?"
"Butter."
"Jam?"
"Jam.  Jam!??  Let's don't be silly.  Lemon now that's different."

In article <1991May21.175359.26377@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>In article <1991May21.155325.17797@cs.yale.edu> mcdermott-drew@cs.yale.edu (Drew McDermott) writes:
>
>>Perhaps the idea is that we tell the human contestant: "You will be
>>disqualified as soon as you allude to anything outside the realm of
>>the conversation itself," but this seems hopelessly unenforceable.
>>Even the machine is bound to have encoded some reference to the
>>outside world in its "game tree."  (E.g., does a reference to chess
>>count as a reference to the outside world?  Presumably it's a merely
>>historical fact that there is such a game, whose rules have been
>>formalized in a certain way as of the late twentieth century.)
>
>How about just "No reference to anything that's happened since 1990."
>Presumably historical knowledge can be built into the machine when it's
>constructed.  The only problem is dealing with things that happen afterwards.

In the multi-world tradition this shouldn't be a problem.  The list of all
possible productions should include all alternative world lines as these are
encompassed within valid English texts.  The state at the beginning of a 
conversation needn't be the same for every run but could be set to that which
takes into account the particular world line we experience.

I've been thinking hard about the differences between electroning learning and
cognitive learning but I guess I am hopelessly confused.  I cannot figure out
if a change in state along a static tree in response to outside information
is learning or not.  That is, having produced this complete tree of all English
conversations in 1980, the response to "What do you think about the way Desert
Storm turned out?" changes sometime in 1991 becuase of the specific 
line taken.  I am very willing to call the state change learning yet I'm not
so sure that what most chess programs do is learning.  Maybe it is short term
learning followed by rapid forgetting.

--gary forbis@u.washington.edu