ainbow is to teach us that the next time God destroys the world it will be by fire and not by water" and "The purpose of the ant is to teach us not to be lazy". Teleological explanations were driven out of biology accompanied by considerable squabbling. In AI the term might be used to refer to goal-driven programs, but then it would seem that the usage is further from the philosophical usage. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 17 Jul 84 11:45:17-PDT From: Bruce Buchanan Subject: AI jargon [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] David, [...] Let me try to give you a straight answer on terminology. I spent five years in hard-core philosophy and never felt that the terms were well-defined there, so it is no wonder that AIers who have adopted the terms from philosophy also have no consistent definitions. Dictionary defns are probably not very illuminating on these things, so I haven't looked at what you might have found there. ONTOLOGY -- a conceptual map, a systematic description of the objects in the world, a study of "what is" [or the discipline of creating an ontology] EPISTEMOLOGY -- a study of what we know & how we know it, usually broken into a priori and a posteriori (or empirical) knowledge TELEOLOGY -- a study of purposeful behavior (often, though not always, defined wrt God's purpose). This is oversimplified, of course. I would recommend Plato's Timaeus and Theaetetus on the first two, and Aristotle's Metaphysics on the last. By the time St.Thomas began writing about these things, their definitions are not so clear as in Plato & Aristotle. Epistemology is the most relevant to AI in its emphasis on knowledge -- what it is, where it comes from, etc. [...] bgb ------------------------------ Date: Wed 18 Jul 84 14:35:14-EDT From: David Rogers Subject: an interesting implicit definition of intelligence Can you spot the fallacy in this implicit definition of intelligence? "As the programs become more refined and the network of paths and boxes grow more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to predict what a computer will decide. In one second, it can process between 10 and 100 thousand logical inferences, or syllogisms. In 1981, the Japanese government announced that it would provide almost a half a billion dollars in seed money over the next decade to produce machines that will be able to draw as many as 1 billion logical inferences per second. If that goal is achieved, a computer could make, in one second, a decision so complex that it would take a human 30 years to unravel it, assuming that he or she could think constantly at the superhuman speed of 1 syllogism per second. Given 10 seconds to ponder a problem, a computer's decision would have to be taken on faith. By human standards it would be unfathomable. When computers can have thoughts that would take more than a human lifetime to understand, it is tempting to consider them smarter than their makers." From "The Lure of Artificial Intelligence", by George Johnson, in the APF reporter, Vol 7, No. 3. (In a box at the bottom of the page, one reads "George Johnson, a freelance writer, is reporting on the quest to build computers smarter than humans.") ------------------------------ Date: 16 Jul 1984 1329 PDT From: Larry Carroll Reply-to: LARRY@JPL-VLSI.ARPA Subject: adverts I don't mind messages like the one (very indirectly) from IBM. I'm quite capable of recognizing even very covert bias and would discount it auto- matically. I'd much rather do my own filtering than have a moderator do it. larry @ jpl-vlsi ------------------------------ Date: Tue 17 Jul 84 20:29:07-PDT From: Ken Laws Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI Subject: GMR DATALOG Demo at AAAI Kurt Godden informs me that General Motors Res. Labs. will have a live demo of their DATALOG natural language query system at their AAAI Villa Capri hospitality suite August 7-8. Vistors can also discuss GMR projects in expert systems, natural language, computer vision, robotics, etc. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: 16 Jul 84 18:35-PDT From: mclure @ Sri-Unix.arpa Subject: Delphi Experiment: move 2 please? The Vote Tally -------------- Folks, the moves are in and have been tallied. The winner is: 1. ... c5. A total of 21 votes were cast. Originally there was a tie between 1. ... c5 and 1. ... e5 with 7 votes each. I cast the deciding vote in favor of the Sicilian because machines play optimally in Classical double-KP positions and we want to avoid positions the machine likes. The Machine Moves ----------------- The Prestige 8-ply replied 2. Nf3 from book in 0 seconds. Humans Move # Votes BR BN BB BQ BK BB BN BR 1 ... c5 8 BP BP ** BP BP BP BP BP 1 ... e5 7 -- ** -- ** -- ** -- ** 1 ... e6 2 ** -- BP -- ** -- ** -- 1 ... d5 1 -- ** -- ** W