Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!gatech!akgua!akguc!codas!peora!jer From: jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) Newsgroups: net.arch Subject: Re: Computational ability of houseflies Message-ID: <2142@peora.UUCP> Date: Mon, 5-May-86 09:30:45 EDT Article-I.D.: peora.2142 Posted: Mon May 5 09:30:45 1986 Date-Received: Thu, 8-May-86 07:20:26 EDT References: <3080@ncsu.UUCP> <468@cubsvax.UUCP> Organization: Concurrent Computer Corporation, Orlando, Fl Lines: 34 > Which brings to mind the question: if we designed a computer as good as a > brain, would it also be as bad as a brain? This reminds me of a colleague of mine back when I briefly worked for an AI company while I was in graduate school; he maintained that it would be a bad thing to make an artificially-intelligent computer really work like the human brain, because it would then also have the shortcomings -- as an example, he cited some AI systems that were prone to "superstition," i.e., incorrectly assuming causality from random events (the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, that event A caused event B because A occurred just before B). > The chemist Kekule several times described his 1857 discovery of the > structure of benzene as having come to him in a a vision, while gazing at > a fire. (Benzene is a ring; he "saw" the ancient alchemical symbol of the > ourobouros, a snake swallowing its tail.) Recently, John Wotiz, a > chemistry professor at Southern Illinois University, has ridiculed the > idea that this is the way it happened, claiming that it Kekule derived the > structure by "hard work" instead of mysical insight. Actually, Kekule's description would seem to me to be in keeping with these spatial or "dimensional" models of memory -- thinking of the snake swallowing its tail might have essentially created a "guess" (in terms of the image of the ring) sufficiently close to the information he had collected in his mind on benzene that the guess then gravitated towards the "correct" structure for benzene in the way the model describes (recall that it says that if you make a guess sufficiently close to a memorized item, then the memorized item will draw your guess to it -- furthermore the models from cognitive psychology say that if you give a person a piece of information that is related in nonobvious ways to other things they already know of, they will tend to "discover" the nonobvious relations eventhough there is no evident, rational reason for their doing so). -- E. Roskos