Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!spool.mu.edu!munnari.oz.au!yoyo.aarnet.edu.au!sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au!jbaxter From: jbaxter@physics.adelaide.edu.au (Jon Baxter) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Turing Test: opinions on an idea Message-ID: <3348@sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au> Date: 22 May 91 04:38:27 GMT Article-I.D.: sirius.3348 References: <2212@seti.inria.fr> Sender: news@ucs.adelaide.edu.au Reply-To: jbaxter@adelphi.physics.adelaide.edu.au.oz.au (Jon Baxter) Organization: Department of Physics, University of Adelaide, South Australia Lines: 37 Nntp-Posting-Host: adelphi.physics.adelaide.edu.au In article <2212@seti.inria.fr> ziane@nuri.inria.fr (ziane mikal @) writes: > > Once again this idea of a conversation tree seems almost ridiculous, although > it is surprisingly a bit more difficult to eliminate than one would > think at first. > > However, how do you cope with numbers ? A number is correct English right ? > How do you incorporate any possible number in your tree ? > If I say "how much is 5 times 3 ?" for example. We don't need to be able to incorporate any possible number in the tree because humans can only handle a very small range of numbers themselves. Sure the tree will need to respond correctly to "how much is 5 times 3", but to the question "how much is 1991 times 1991" all the tree has to reply is "I don't have a pencil and paper: I can't work that one out." Even if we demand that the tree behaves as if it did possess pencil and paper, there is still a limit to the size of the calculation it can be pretending to perform, (ask me to calculate "251521271185 times 1276151512" and I'll tell you to get lost!) and so there is still a limit to the number of possibilities that need to be encoded into the tree. .....More stuff....... > Finaly we should agree about the mechanism using the tree and about the > tree. Somebody has proposed grammars etc. If anything like that is used > of course (and I think it was the point of this person) the system may > produce acceptable answers because it would be intelligent ! > The first proposal was a simple table lookup, right ? I agree that the point of this discussion is lost if we start incorporating more complicated algorithmic procedures such as grammars into our table look-up. Still, there is a surprising amount that can be done with a table look-up. Even the problem of describing ones surroundings can be solved by simply leaving certain entries in the table blank, to be filled in when more is known about the table's environment. Jon.