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From: taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor)
Newsgroups: mod.comp-soc
Subject: Re: More thoughts on Computers and Common Sense
Message-ID: <498@hplabsc.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 25-Jul-86 03:36:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: hplabsc.498
Posted: Fri Jul 25 03:36:15 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 25-Jul-86 21:54:04 EDT
Reply-To: hplabs!pyramid!utzoo!henry
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
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Approved: taylor@hplabs
Reference: <429@hplabsc.UUCP>


This article is from pyramid!utzoo!henry (Henry Spencer)
 and was received on Thu Jul 24 20:33:09 1986
 
> ... Do you challenge the superior human inference 
> capabilities, which is mostly what "common sense" is all about?  
> 
> ...Of course, the program works fine. Compare
> that with a human, that has to work with much less knowledge (at a given
> time) available in his/her memory... but with superior intellect,
> who is then able to produce results of any worth. The expert system has
> more knowledge/information available to it, but much less functionality
> in its "inference engine".

If there is anything that the expert systems, and their development
processes, have taught us, it's that inference plays a far smaller part
in human thought than anyone expected.  The strong point of human beings
*is* the vast mass of information they have available, and the little-
understood indexing system that permits rapid retrieval from a large
data base by vague criteria.  Well, that and the ability to add data "on
the fly" based on new experience.  The human brain is not a good inference
engine, as witness how difficult it is to prepare a truly rigorous proof
of a non-trivial theorem.

				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry

[Not only that, Henry, but the interesting thing about the human brain
 (or should I say `the mind') is that there are different classes of
 neural connections, or, on a more vague level, between units of
 information.  Consider the difference between knowing that a word is
 spelled wrong and knowing how to spell it.  When people ask me to spell
 a word I usually scrawl it on something near and let my pattern recog-
 nition system figure it out.  How many times have you seen words that
 `looked wrong'? Just some stuff to think about...(augh!  what a 
 comment!)  -- Dave]