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From: powell%mwcamis@MITRE.ARPA
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Natural Kinds
Message-ID: <8707291203.AA05502@mitre.arpa>
Date: Wed, 29-Jul-87 08:03:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: mitre.8707291203.AA05502
Posted: Wed Jul 29 08:03:56 1987
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  Minsky's notion of natural types involving both structure and function
does seem plausible.  One could think of each natural type as a
bipartite graph where one node class represents structural components
and where the other node type represents each function of the natural
type.  Connections between the two node classes would represent
(in a crude way) the way in which portions of each class relate to
the nodes of the other class.
     
  Even more specifically, the entire design foundations
as would be recorded in the data dependency net of an ATMS recording
the design process (function to structure) would capture still more about
the natural type.  This seems
like a bizarely specific way to define a hazy notion like natural types,
but it does appear to follow naturally from Minsky's proposal.