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AIList Digest Volume 1 Issue 098
AIList Digest Tuesday, 15 Nov 1983 Volume 1 : Issue 98
Today's Topics:
Intelligence - Definitions & Metadiscussion,
Looping Problem,
Architecture - Parallelism vs. Novel Architecture,
Pattern Recognition - Optic Flow & Forced Matching,
Ethics & AI,
Review - Biography of Turing
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Date: 14 Nov 1983 15:03-PST
From: fc%usc-cse%USC-ECL@SRI-NIC
Subject: Re: AIList Digest V1 #96
An intelligent race is one with a winner, not one that keeps on
rehashing the first 5 yards till nobody wants to watch it anymore.
FC
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Date: 14 Nov 83 10:22:29-PST (Mon)
From: ihnp4!houxm!mhuxl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!ncsu!fostel @ Ucb-Vax
Subject: Intelligence and Killing
Article-I.D.: ncsu.2396
Someone wondered if there was evidence that intelligence was related to
the killing off of other animals. Presumably that person is prepared to
refute the apparant similtaneous claims of man as the most intelligent
and the most deadly animal. Personally, I might vote dolphins as more
intelligent, but I bet they do their share of killing too. They eat things.
----GaryFostel----
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Date: 14 Nov 83 14:01:55-PST (Mon)
From: ihnp4!ihuxv!portegys @ Ucb-Vax
Subject: Behavioristic definition of intelligence
Article-I.D.: ihuxv.584
What is the purpose of knowing whether something is
intelligent? Or has a soul? Or has consciousness?
I think one of the reasons is that it makes it easier to
deal with it. If a creature is understood to be a human
being, we all know something about how to behave toward it.
And if a machine exhibits intelligence, the quintessential
quality of human beings, we also will know what to do.
One of the things that this implies is that we really should
not worry too much about whether a machine is intelligent
until one gets here. The definition of it will be in part
determined by how we behave toward it. Right now, I don't feel
very confused about how to act in the presence of a computer
running an AI program.
Tom Portegys, Bell Labs IH, ihuxv!portegys
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Date: 12 Nov 83 19:38:02-PST (Sat)
From: decvax!decwrl!flairvax!kissell @ Ucb-Vax
Subject: Re: the halting problem in history
Article-I.D.: flairvax.267
"...If there were any subroutines in the brain that did not halt..."
It seems to me that there are likely large numbers of subroutines in the
brain that aren't *supposed* to halt. Like breathing. Nothing wrong with
that; the brain is not a metaphor for a single-instruction-stream
processor. I've often suspected, though, that some pathological states,
depression, obsession, addiction, etcetera can be modeled as infinite
loops "executed" by a portion of the brain, and thus why "shock" treatments
sometimes have beneficial effects on depression; a brutal "reset" of the
whole "system".
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Date: Tue, 15 Nov 83 07:58 PST
From: "Glasser Alan"@LLL-MFE.ARPA
Subject: parallelism vs. novel architecture
There has been a lot of discussion in this group recently about the
role of parallelism in artificial intelligence. If I'm not mistaken,
this discussion began in response to a message I sent in, reviving a
discussion of a year ago in Human-Nets. My original message raised
the question of whether there might exist some crucial, hidden,
architectural mechanism, analogous to DNA in genetics, which would
greatly clarify the workings of intelligence. Recent discussions
have centered on the role of parallelism alone. I think this misses
the point. While parallelism can certainly speed things up, it is
not the kind of fundamental departure from past practices which I
had in mind. Perhaps a better example would be Turing's and von
Neumann's concept of the stored-program computer, replacing earlier
attempts at hard-wired computers. This was a fundamental break-
through, without which nothing like today's computers could be
practical. Perhaps true intelligence, of the biological sort,
requires some structural mechanism which has yet to be imagined.
While it's true that a serial Turing machine can do anything in
principle, it may be thoroughly impractical to program it to be
truly intelligent, both because of problems of speed and because of
the basic awkwardness of the architecture. What is hopelessly
cumbersome in this architecture may be trivial in the right one. I
know this sounds pretty vague, but I don't think it's meaningless.
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Date: Mon 14 Nov 83 17:59:07-PST
From: David E.T. Foulser <FOULSER@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
Subject: Re: AIList Digest V1 #97
There is a paper by Kruskal on multi-dimensional scaling that might be of
interest to the user interested in vision processing. I'm not too clear on
what he's doing, so this could be off-base.
Dave Foulser
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Date: Mon 14 Nov 83 22:24:45-MST
From: Stanley T. Shebs <SHEBS@UTAH-20.ARPA>
Subject: Pattern Matchers
Thanks for the replies about loop detection; some food for thought
in there...
My next puzzle is about pattern matchers. Has anyone looked carefully
at the notion of a "non-failing" pattern matcher? By that I mean one
that never or almost never rejects things as non-matching. Consider
a database of assertions (or whatever) and the matcher as a search
function which takes a pattern as argument. If something in the db
matches the pattern, then it is returned. At this point, the caller
can either accept or reject the item from the db. If rejected, the
matcher would be called again, to find something else matching, and
so forth. So far nothing unusual. The matcher will eventually
signal utter failure, and that there is nothing satisfactory in the
database. My idea is to have the matcher constructed in such a way
that it will return things until the database is entirely scanned, even
if the given pattern is a very simple and rigid one. In other words,
the matcher never gives up - it will always try to find the most
tenuous excuse to return a match.
Applications I have in mind: NLP for garbled and/or incomplete sentences,
and creative thinking (what does a snake with a tail in its mouth
have to do with benzene? talk about tenuous connections!).
The idea seems related to fuzzy logic (an area I am sadly ignorant
of), but other than that, there seems to be no work on the idea
(perhaps it's a stupid one?). There seem to be two main problems -
organizing the database in such a way that the matcher can easily
progress from exact matches to extremely remote ones (can almost
talk about a metric space of assertions!), and setting up the
matcher's caller so as not to thrash too badly (example: a parser
may have trouble deciding whether a sentence is grammatically
incorrect or a word's misspelling looks like another word,
if the word analyzer has a nonfailing matcher).
Does anybody know anything about this? Is there a fatal flaw
somewhere?
Stan Shebs
BTW, a frame-based system can be characterized as a semantic net
(if you're willing to mung concepts!), and a semantic net can
be mapped into an undirected graph, which *is* a metric space.
------------------------------
Date: 14 November 1983 1359-PST (Monday)
From: crummer at AEROSPACE (Charlie Crummer)
Subject: Ethics and AI Research
Dave Rogers brought up the subject of ethics in AI research. I agree with him
that we must continually evaluate the projects we are asked to work on.
Unfortunately, like the example he gave of physicists working on the bombs,
we will not always know what the government has in mind for our work. It may
be valid to indict the workers on the Manhattan project because they really
did have an idea what was going on but the very early researchers in the
field of radioactivity probably did not know how their discoveries would be
used.
The application of morality must go beyond passively choosing not to
work on certain projects. We must become actively involved in the
application by our government of the ideas we create. Once an idea or
physical effect is discovered it can never be undiscovered. If I
choose not to work on a project (which I definitely would if I thought
it immoral) that may not make much difference. Someone else will
always be waiting to pick up the work. It is sort of like preventing
rape by refusing to rape anyone.
--Charlie
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Date: 14 Nov 83 1306 PST
From: Russell Greiner <RDG@SU-AI>
Subject: Biography of Turing
[Reprinted from the SU-SCORE bboard.]
n055 1247 09 Nov 83
BC-BOOK-REVIEW (UNDATED)
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
c. 1983 N.Y. Times News Service
ALAN TURING: The Enigma. By Andrew Hodges. 587 pages.
Illustrated. Simon & Schuster. $22.50.
He is remembered variously as the British cryptologist whose
so-called ''Enigma'' machine helped to decipher Germany's top-secret
World War II code; as the difficult man who both pioneered and
impeded the advance of England's computer industry; and as the
inventor of a theoretical automaton sometimes called the ''Turing
(Editors: umlaut over the u) Machine,'' the umlaut being, according
to a glossary published in 1953, ''an unearned and undesirable
addition, due, presumably, to an impression that anything so
incomprehensible must be Teutonic.''
But this passionately exhaustive biography by Andrew Hodges, an
English mathematician, brings Alan Turing very much back to life and
offers a less forbidding impression. Look at any of the many verbal
snapshots that Hodges offers us in his book - Turing as an
eccentrically unruly child who could keep neither his buttons aligned
nor the ink in his pen, and who answered his father when asked if he
would be good, ''Yes, but sometimes I shall forget!''; or Turing as
an intense young man with a breathless high-pitched voice and a
hiccuppy laugh - and it is difficult to think of him as a dark
umlauted enigma.
Yet the mind of the man was an awesome force. By the time he was 24
years old, in 1936, he had conceived as a mathematical abstraction
his computing machine and completed the paper ''Computable Numbers,''
which offered it to the world. Thereafter, Hodges points out, his
waves of inspiration seemed to flow in five-year intervals - the
Naval Enigma in 1940, the design for his Automatic Computing Engine
(ACE) in 1945, a theory of structural evolution, or morphogenesis, in
1950. In 1951, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was
not yet 40.
But the next half-decade interval did not bring further revelation.
In February 1952, he was arrested, tried, convicted and given a
probationary sentence for ''Gross Indecency contrary to Section 11 of
the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885,'' or the practice of male
homosexuality, a ''tendency'' he had never denied and in recent years
had admitted quite openly. On June 7, 1954, he was found dead in his
home near Manchester, a bitten, presumably cyanide-laced apple in his
hand.
Yet he had not been despondent over his legal problems. He was not
in disgrace or financial difficulty. He had plans and ideas; his work
was going well. His devoted mother - about whom he had of late been
having surprisingly (to him) hostile dreams as the result of a
Jungian psychoanalysis - insisted that his death was the accident she
had long feared he would suffer from working with dangerous
chemicals. The enigma of Alan Mathison Turing began to grow.
Andrew Hodges is good at explaining Turing's difficult ideas,
particularly the evolution of his theoretical computer and the
function of his Enigma machines. He is adept at showing us the
originality of Turing's mind, especially the passion for truth (even
when it damaged his career) and the insistence on bridging the worlds
of the theoretical and practical. The only sections of the biography
that grow tedious are those that describe the debates over artificial
intelligence - or maybe it's the world's resistance to artificial
intelligence that is tedious. Turing's position was straightforward
enough: ''The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to
be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that
at the end of the century the use of words and general educated
opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of
machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.''
On the matter of Turing's suicide, Hodges concedes its
incomprehensibility, but then announces with sudden melodrama: ''The
board was ready for an end game different from that of Lewis
Carroll's, in which Alice captured the Red Queen, and awoke from
nightmare. In real life, the Red Queen had escaped to feasting and
fun in Moscow. The White Queen would be saved, and Alan Turing
sacrificed.''
What does Hodges mean by his portentous reference to cold-war
politics? Was Alan Turing a murdered spy? Was he a spy? Was he the
victim of some sort of double-cross? No, he was none of the above:
the author is merely speculating that as the cold war heated up, it
must have become extremely dangerous to be a homosexual in possession
of state secrets. Hodges is passionate on the subject of the
precariousness of being homosexual; it was partly his participation
in the ''gay liberation'' movement that got him interested in Alan
Turing in the first place.
Indeed, one has to suspect Hodges of an overidentification with Alan
Turing, for he goes on at far too great length on Turing's
existential vulnerability. Still, word by word and sentence by
sentence, he can be exceedingly eloquent on his subject. ''He had
clung to the simple amidst the distracting and frightening complexity
of the world,'' the author writes of Turing's affinity for the
concrete.
''Yet he was not a narrow man,'' Hodges continues. ''Mrs. Turing was
right in saying, as she did, that he died while working on a
dangerous experiment. It was the experiment called LIFE - a subject
largely inducing as much fear and embarrassment for the official
scientific world as for her. He had not only thought freely, as best
he could, but had eaten of two forbidden fruits, those of the world
and of the flesh. They violently disagreed with each other, and in
that disagreement lay the final unsolvable problem.''
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End of AIList Digest
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