Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!hci.hw.ac.UK!gilbert From: gilbert@hci.hw.ac.UK (Gilbert Cockton) Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Re: Gilding the Lemon Message-ID: <143@glenlivet.hci.hw.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 5-Nov-87 12:13:39 EST Article-I.D.: glenlive.143 Posted: Thu Nov 5 12:13:39 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 11-Nov-87 04:43:28 EST References: <12346288066.15.LAWS@KL.SRI.Com> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: Gilbert Cockton Organization: Scottish HCI Centre Lines: 48 Approved: ailist@kl.sri.com In article <12346288066.15.LAWS@KL.SRI.Com> Laws@KL.SRI.COM (Ken Laws) writes: >......, but there has been more payoff from GPSS and SIMSCRIPT (and >SPICE and other simulation systems) e.g.? >Most Ph.D. projects have the same flavor. A student ... >... publishes the interesting behaviors he was able to generate e.g.? > ... we must build hand-crank phonographs before inventing information >theory and we must study the properties of atoms before debating >quarks and strings. Inadmissable until it can be established that such relationships exist in the study of intelligence - there may be only information theory and quarks, in which case you have to head right for them now. Anything else is liable to be a social construct of limited generality. Most work today in fact suggests that EVERYTHING is going to be a social construct, even the quarks. Analogies with the physical world do not necessarily hold for the mental world, anymore than does animism for the physical world. >An advisor who advocates duplicating prior work is cutting his >students' chances of fame and fortune from the discovery of the >one true path. .... Why should the student >work (be they theoretical or practical problems) when he could >attach his name to an entirely new approach? The aim of PhD studies is to advance knowledge, not individuals. This amounts to gross self-indulgeance where I come from. I recognise that most people in AI come from somewhere else though :-) Perhaps there are no new approaches, perhaps the set of all imaginable metaphysics, epistemology and ontology is closed. In the History of Ideas, one rarely sees anything with no similar antecedents. More problematic for AI, the real shifts of thinkers like Machiavelli, Bacon, Hume, Marx and Freud did not involve PhD studies centred on computer programming. I really do think that the *ABSENCE* of a computer is more likely to produce new approaches, as the computational paradigm severely limits what you can do, just as the experimental paradigm of psychology puts many areas of study beyond the pale. -- Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.hci ARPA: gilbert%hci.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk UUCP: ..{backbone}!mcvax!ukc!hwcs!hci!gilbert