Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.ai.toronto.edu!louis From: louis@ai.toronto.edu (Louis Lin) Subject: Re: AI and people Message-ID: <88Jun13.120427edt.280@neat.ai.toronto.edu> Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto References: <52.22A80968@isishq.UUCP> Date: Mon, 13 Jun 88 10:44:21 EDT In article <52.22A80968@isishq.UUCP> doug@isishq.UUCP (Doug Thompson) writes: >Look at chess programs, one of the classic AI projects. A chess program >needs to mimic human thought in a very narrow and precise application, >where a whole lot of mathematics and rules apply. Ideal for AI. > >Chess program research began by interviewing many chess players to find >out just how the human mind did approach chess problems. The results of >that line of research were dismal. No one was able to come up with much >on how the human mind tackles chess problems. > Modern AI research does not focus that much on game playing. It turns out that playing a game like chess is a very complex process. More attention is paid on fundamental subjects such as vision and knowledge representation. >So the approach was changed, "never mind how the human mind does it, can >we make a computer that will do as well using any technique at all?". Conventional computers are very different from human brains (serial vs. parallel, digital vs. analog). It is not reasonable to expect a computer to perform a task in the way a person does. >If AI people wanted to understand the mind, why aren't they in >philosophy? There is certainly more work being done in understanding the >human mind there. I don't agree with you here. The philosophy people may have done more work in understanding the human mind, but understanding is very different from modelling it. >Scientific knowledge is only one kind of knowledge. It is not all >knowledge, and it is almost always relative knowledge, more a capacity >to describe and predict natural phenomenon which are sensible and >predictable. Science can do nothing much with phenomenon which >are neither sensible nor predictable. Sensibility and predictability are relative to the knowledge and technology we have. A caveman cannot predict tomorrow's weather with his knowlegde. Certainly we do better (although not much :-) in weather prediction. As knowledge grows, more things can be explained scientifically. I believe that all knowledge are scientific. We just do not know how to explain some of them using our current technology. >too often when we say "that problem is not scientific" we imply "that >problem is not important". I agree with you here. We tend to ignore important problems which is unsolvable using current technology. >The public will forget, but we must not. The computer will never answer >all questions, and it may not even be able to understand the most >important of questions. You can never be sure what we will do next :-). -- Louis Hiu-Chuen Lin internet : louis@ai.toronto.edu 38 Glendale Rd. Thornhill Ontario L3T 6Y1