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From: hayes.pa@XEROX.COM
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Re: Generality in Artificial Intelligence
Message-ID: <19880724060138.0.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: 24 Jul 88 06:01:00 GMT
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Date: Wed, 20 Jul 88 11:32 EDT
From: hayes.pa@Xerox.COM
Subject: Re: Generality in Artificial Intelligence
To: AIList@AI.AI.MIT.EDU
cc: hayes.pa@Xerox.COM

Steve Easterbrook gives us an old idea: that the way to get all the knowledge
our systems need is to let them experience it for themselves.  It doesnt work
like that, however, for several reasons. 

First, most of our common sense isnt in episodic memory.   That candles burn
more often than tables isnt something from episodic memory, for example.  Or is
the suggestion is that we only store episodes and do the inductive
generalisations whenever we need to by remarkably efficient internal access
machinery?  Apart from the engineering difficulties ( I can imagine 1PC being
reinvented as a handy device to save memory ),  this has the problem that lots
of what we know CANT be induced from experiences.  Ive never been to Africa or
ancient Rome, for example, but I know a fair bit about them.

But the more serious problem is that the very idea of storing experiences
assumes that there is some way to encode the experiences, some episodic memory
which can represent episodes.  I dont mean which knows how to index them
efficiently, just put them into memory in the first place.  You know that, in
your `..experience, candles are burnt much more often than tables.'  How are all
those experiences of candle-combustion represented in your head?  Put your wee
robot in front of a candle, and what happens in its head?  Now think of all the
other stuff your episodic memory has to be able to represent.  How is this
representing done?  Maybe after a while following this thought you will begin to
see McCarthys footsteps on the trail in front of you.

Pat Hayes