Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!its63b!aipna!rjc
From: rjc@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Richard Caley)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Me and Karl Kluge
Message-ID: <45@aipna.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 13 Jun 88 15:14:53 GMT
References: <1792@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1312@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <43@aipna.ed.ac.uk> <1342@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Organization: Dept. of AI, Edinburgh, UK
Lines: 68
In-reply-to: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk's message of 10 Jun 88 14:42:15 GMT
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.44.4 of Fri Oct  9 1987 on aipna (berkeley-unix)


In <1342@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton)
>In article <43@aipna.ed.ac.uk> rjc@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Richard Caley) writes:

>>Natural language processing...builds on the work of linguistics.

>and ignores most of the work beyond syntax :-) 

Some does.

>Hmm pragmatics.  I know there is AI
>work on pragmtics, but I don't know if a non-computational linguist
>working on semantics and pragmatics would call it advanced research work.

The criterion for it being interesting would not necessarily be explaining
something new, explaining something in a more extensible/elegant/practical/
formal ( choose your own hobby horse ) is just as good.

>But what when there is no ground? Then what?  Hack first or study?

Maybe my metaphor was not well chosen. Rather than building up it
might be better to see the computational work building down, trying to
ground its borrowed theories ( of language or whatever ) in something
other than their own symbols and/or set theory.

your question becomes, what when there is nothing to hang your work from?
In that case you should go out and do the groundwork or, better, get
someone trained in the empirical methods of that field to do it. 

>(exception Interllisp-D interface, but this was an end-user project!).

ARGH don't even mention it, it just lost my days work for me.

>(I accept that proof of our logical (worse than physical) determinism
>would be a revelation)

Well physical determinism wouldn't be a revelation to many of us
who assume it already. I don't know your definition of logical determinism
so I can't say whether that is worse. If it is meant to apply to all
possible outcomes of strong AI it can't imply lack of free will ( read
as the property of making your own decisions, rather than exclusion from
causality ), what does it imply that is so shocking.

>>What do the theories of physics tell us that we couldn't find out by
>>studying objects.
>Nothing.

But they do. Studying objects just tells you what has happened. A (correct)
theory can be predictive, can be explainatory, can allow one to deduce
properties of the system under study which are not derivable from the
data.

>Strong AI on the other hand conducts NO study of people, 

Strong AI does not require the study of people, it is not "computational
psycology". AI workers study people in order to  avoid reinventing wheels.

>>>     The proper object of the study of humanity is humans, not machines

>And there goes your parser too.

 Oops. I'm afraid I read it as parallel to "The proper study of man is man".

It does seem to be something of a hollow statement; I can't think of
many people who study machines as a study of humanity ( except in the
degenerate case, if one believes humans are machines ). Some people
use machines as tools to study human beings, some study and build
machines.