Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!apple!oliveb!pyramid!prls!philabs!linus!mbunix!bwk From: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Summary: Pick a response... Keywords: Understanding, Comprehension, Learning Message-ID: <45542@linus.UUCP> Date: 1 Mar 89 13:17:12 GMT References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <45126@linus.UUCP> <125@arcturus.edsdrd.eds.com> <7653@venera.isi.edu> Sender: news@linus.UUCP Reply-To: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry Kort) Organization: Silver Bullet Industries, Ouray, CO Lines: 23 Now that I think about it, I, too, took a course in which I failed to comprehend the subject, yet I could mechanically do the motions which, on the surface, suggested I knew what I was doing. The course was a compressed introduction to Probability and Statistics for people who had completed their undergraduate curriculum but hadn't yet entered grad school. We met 5 days a week for 2 months. It was brutal. At one point, the professor introduced the notion of Borel Sets, which provide an abstract foundation for probability theory. Now Borel sets are unreal, like fractal dust. Very hard to understand. There were a series of theorems and proofs that no one understood. But for some peculiar reason, the proofs always started out with "Pick a partition...". Now none of us knew what the professor meant by "pick a partition". But by the time he got to the fourth proof, he said, "How do we prove this?". The class answered in unision, "Pick a partition." "RIght," he said, and proceeded to complete the details of the proof. Twenty years later, I still don't know what he meant. --Barry Kort