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From: spe@SPICE.CS.CMU.EDU (Sean Engelson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: The success of AI (misunderstandings)
Message-ID: <213@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>
Date: Thu, 22-Oct-87 10:21:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: PT.213
Posted: Thu Oct 22 10:21:54 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Oct-87 01:44:25 EDT
Sender: netnews@PT.CS.CMU.EDU
Reply-To: spe@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Sean Engelson)
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 33

Keywords:



A couple of clarifications in response to recent posts:

(a) My name is Engelson---NOT Engleson.

(b) I did not state that we could simulate the human body and brain at
this point in time.  However, we could at some point, presumably, get
to the point where we know precisely how the body is constructed, and
construct a simulation of the physical processes that occur.  This is
reasonable because the human body is finite in extent, and thus there
is a finite amount of information to discover, thus it can be
discovered in finite (although possibly very large) time.  This is why
I say that computers are not a less-powerful model of computation than
the human brain, as the one can simulate the other.  By 'as powerful'
I mean that the same computations may be performed by both; in the
same sense that a serial computer is as powerful as a parallel one, as
the one can simulate the other, although with a great loss of efficiency.

(c) No, it would not be neccesary to simulate the physical world in
our hypothetical super-computer.  We could simulate the actions of the
sensory inputs by filtering such things as movie-camera output,
tactile sensors, etc., through a simulation of human sensory organs.
We know that that is theoretically possible through the same line of
reasoning as above.

	-Sean-
--
Sean Philip Engelson			I have no opinions.  
Carnegie-Mellon University		Therefore my employer is mine.
Computer Science Department	
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