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From: mps@duke.cs.duke.edu (Michael P. Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: AI in the 13th Century
Message-ID: <9810@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Date: Wed, 24-Jun-87 13:03:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: duke.9810
Posted: Wed Jun 24 13:03:34 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Jun-87 05:03:19 EDT
References: <1654@uwmacc.UUCP>
Reply-To: mps@duke.UUCP (Michael P. Smith)
Organization: Duke University, Durham NC
Lines: 45
Keywords: artificial intelligence, Raymond Lull, mechanical reasoning
Summary: Lull's Ars Magna


In article <1654@uwmacc.UUCP> edwards@uwmacc.UUCP (mark edwards) writes:
>
> A number of people have asked about the reference to AI in the
> 13th Century. Well I finally dug up the ole notebook and picked
> it out. Unfortunately all I have is a name. The name is
>
>  Ramon Lull
>
>
> Since the book was in latin, very old and so forth I guess I thought
> I'd never check it out. Apparently Ramon was a popular person in the
> sciences, black magic and those sort of things. His name appears
> with other terms like shamans in my notebook.
>

I'm no Lull expert, but here's part of an entry from W.L. Reese's
DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION (Humanities, 1980), p. 319:
\begin{quotation}
Lull, Raymond. 1236-1315.
	Philosopher and missionary.  Born in Palma, Majorca.  Taught
several years at Paris.  His goal was to state the truths Christianity
so succinctly that the infidels could not possibly deny them.  To this
end he wrote the *Ars Magna*, a mechanical method of exhaustively
stating the possible relations of a topic.  The method requires three
concentric circles divided into compartments.  One circle is divided
into nine relevant subjects; a second circle is divided into nine
relevant predicates; the third circle is divided into nine questions:
whether? what? whence? why? how large? of what kind? when? where? how?
One circle is fixed; the others rotate, providing a complete series of
questions, and of statements in relation to them.
\end{quotation}
Lull is usually dismissed as a crackpot by historians, but had
influence on the likes of Descartes and Leibniz centuries later.
I believe that much of Lull's work is available in English translation.

No doubt some interesting comparisons can be drawn between Lull's
program and, say, conceptual dependency theory.  But as to Mark's
claim that Lull used the term 'artificial intelligence', I suspect
that such usage occurs only in the mind of the translator.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael P. Smith		"The world of the happy man is a different
ARPA: mps@duke.cs.duke.edu	one from that of the unhappy man."
					Wittgenstein