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AIList Digest Volume 1 Issue 107
AIList Digest Friday, 2 Dec 1983 Volume 1 : Issue 107
Today's Topics:
Programming Languages - Lisp Productivity,
Alert - Psychology Today,
Learning & Expert Systems,
Intelligence - Feedback Model & Categorization,
Scientific Method - Psychology,
Puzzle - The Lady or the Tiger,
Seminars - Commerce Representation & Learning Linguistic Categories
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Date: 27 Nov 83 16:57:39-PST (Sun)
From: decvax!tektronix!tekcad!franka @ Ucb-Vax
Subject: Re: lisp productivity question - (nf)
Article-I.D.: tekcad.145
I don't have any documentation, but I heard once from an attendee
at a workshop on design automation that someone had reported a 5:1 productivity
improvement in LISP vs. C, PASCAL, etc. From personal experience I know this
to be true, also. I once wrote a game program in LISP in two days. I later
spent two weeks debugging the same game in a C version (I estimated another
factor of 4 for a FORTRAN version). The nice thing about LISP is not that
the amount of code written is less (although it is, usually by a factor of
2 to 3), but that its environment (even in the scrungy LISPs) is much easier
to debug and modify code in.
From the truly menacing,
/- -\ but usually underestimated,
<-> Frank Adrian
(tektronix!tekcad!franka)
[A caveat: Lisp is very well suited to the nature of game programs.
A fair test would require that data processing and numerical analysis
problems be included in the mix of test problems. -- KIL]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 83 11:03 EST
From: Steven Gutfreund <gutfreund%umass-cs@CSNet-Relay>
Subject: Psychology Today
The December issue of Psychology Today (V 17, #12) has some more articles
that may be of interest to AI people. The issue is titled "USER FRIENDLY"
and talks about technological advances that have made machines easier.
The articles of interest are:
On Papert, Minsky, and John Anderson page 26
An Article written by McCarthy page 46
An Interview with Alan Kay Page 50
(why they call him the Grand old Man is
beyond me, Alan is only 43)
- steve
------------------------------
Date: Tue 29 Nov 83 18:36:01-EST
From: Albert Boulanger <ABOULANGER@BBNG.ARPA>
Subject: Learning Expert systems
Re: Brint Cooper's remark on non-learning expert systems being "dumb":
Yes, some people would agree with you. In fact, Dr. R.S. Michalski's group
at the U of Illinois is building an Expert System, ADVISE, that incorporates
learning capabilities.
Albert Boulanger
ABOULANGER@BBNG
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 83 09:07 PST
From: NNicoll.ES@PARC-MAXC.ARPA
Subject: "Intelligence"
I see Intelligence as the sophistication of the deep structure
mechanisms that generate both thought and behavior. These structures
(per Albus), work as cross-coupled hierarchies of phase-locked loops,
generating feedback hypotheses about the stimulus at each level of the
hierarchy. These feedback hypotheses are better at predicting and
matching the stimulus if the structure holds previous patterns that are
similar to the present stimulus. Therefore, intelligence is a function
of both the amount of knowledge possible to bring to bear on pattern
matching a present problem (inference), and the number of levels in the
structure of the hierarchy the organism (be it mechanical or organic)
can bring to bear on breaking the stimulus/pattern down into its
component parts and generate feedback hypotheses to adjust the organisms
response at each level.
I feel any structure sufficiently complex to exhibit intelligence, be it
a bird-brained idiot whose height of reasoning is "find fish - eat
fish", or "Deep Thought" who can break down the structures and reason
about a whole world, should be considered intelligent, but with
different "amounts" of intelligence, and possibly about different
experiences. I do not think there is any "threshold" above which an
organism can be considered intelligent and below which they are not.
This level would be too arbitrary a structure for anything except very
delimited areas.
So, lets get on with the pragmatic aspects of this work, creating better
slaves to do our scut work for us, our reasoning about single-mode
structures too complex for a human brain to assimilate, our tasks in
environments too dangerous for organic creatures, and our tasks too
repetitious for the safety of the human brain/body structure, and move
to a lower priority the re-creation of pseudo-human "intelligence". I
think that would require a pseudo-human brain structure (combining both
"Emotion" and "Will") that would be interesting only in research on
humanity (create a test-bed wherein experiments that are morally
unacceptable when performed on organic humans could be entertained).
Nick Nicoll
------------------------------
Date: 29 Nov 83 20:47:33-PST (Tue)
From: decvax!ittvax!dcdwest!sdcsvax!sdcsla!west @ Ucb-Vax
Subject: Re: Intelligence and Categorization
Article-I.D.: sdcsla.461
From: AXLER.Upenn-1100@Rand-Relay
(David M. Axler - MSCF Applications Mgr.)
I think Tom Portegys' comment in 1:98 is very true.
Knowing whether or not a thing is intelligent, has a soul,
etc., is quite helpful in letting us categorize it. And,
without that categorization, we're unable to know how to
understand it. Two minor asides that might be relevant in
this regard:
1) There's a school of thought in the fields of
linguistics, folklore, anthropology, and folklore, which is
based on the notion (admittedly arguable) that the only way
to truly understand a culture is to first record and
understand its native categories, as these structure both
its language and its thought, at many levels. (This ties in
to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language structures
culture, not the reverse...) From what I've read in this
area, there is definite validity in this approach. So, if
it's reasonable to try and understand a culture in terms of
its categories (which may or may not be translatable into
our own culture's categories, of course), then it's equally
reasonable for us to need to categorize new things so that
we can understand them within our existing framework.
Deciding whether a thing is or is not intelligent seems to be a hairier
problem than "simply" categorizing its behavior and other attributes.
As to point #1, trying to understand a culture by looking at how it
categorizes does not constitute a validation of the process of
categorization (particularly in scientific endeavours). Restated: There
is no connection between the fact that anthropologists find that studying
a culture's categories is a very powerful tool for aiding understanding,
and the conclusion that we need to categorize new things to understand them.
I'm not saying that categorization is useless (far from it), but Sapir-Whorf's
work has no direct bearing on this subject (in my view).
What I am saying is that while deciding to treat something as "intelligent",
e.g., a computer chess program, may prove to be the most effective way of
dealing with it in "normal life", it doesn't do a thing for understanding
the thing. If you choose to classify the chess program as intelligent,
what has that told you about the chess program? If you classify it
as unintelligent...? I think this reflects more upon the interaction
between you and the chess program than upon the structure of the chess
program.
-- Larry West UC San Diego
-- ARPA: west@NPRDC
-- UUCP: ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdcsla!west
-- or ucbvax:sdcsvax:sdcsla:west
------------------------------
Date: 28 Nov 83 18:53:46-PST (Mon)
From: harpo!eagle!mhuxl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!ncsu!fostel @ Ucb-Vax
Subject: Rational Psych & Scientific Method
Article-I.D.: ncsu.2416
Well, I hope this is the last time ....
Again, I have been accused of ignorance; again the accustation is false.
Its fortunate only my words can make it into this medium. I would
appreciate the termination of this discussion, but will not stand by
and be patronized without responding. All sane and rational people,
hit the <del> and go on to the next news item please.
When I say psychologists do not do very good science I am talking about
the exact same thing you are talking about. There is no escape. Those
"rigorous" experiments sometime succeed in establishing some "facts",
but they are sufficiently encumbered by lack of controls that one often
does not know what to make of them. This is not to imply a critisism of
psychologists as intellectually inferior to chemists, but the field is
just not there yet. Is Linguistics a science? Is teaching a science?
Laws (and usually morals) prevent the experiments we need, to do REAL
controlled experiments; lack of understanding would probably prevent
immediate progress even in the absence of those laws. Its a bit like
trying to make a "scientific" study of a silicon wafer with 1850's tools
and understanding of electronics. A variety of interesting facts could
be established, but it is not clear that they would be very useful. Tack
on some I/O systems and you could then perhaps allow the collection of
reams of timing and capability data and could try to corrollate the results
and try to build theories -- that LOOKS like science. But is it? In
my book, to be a science, there must be a process of convergence in which
the theories more ever closer to explaining reality, and the experiments
become ever more precise. I don't see much convergence in experimental
psychology. I see more of a cyclic nature to the theories ....
----GaryFostel----
P.S. There are a few other sciences which do not deserve
the title, so don't feel singled out. Computer
Science for example.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 83 11:15 EST
From: Chris Moss <Moss.UPenn@Rand-Relay>
Subject: The Lady or the Tiger
[Reprinted from the Prolog Digest.]
Since it's getting near Christmas, here are a few puzzlers to
solve in Prolog. They're taken from Raymond Smullyan's delightful
little book of the above name. Sexist allusions must be forgiven.
There once was a king, who decided to try his prisoners by giving
them a logic puzzle. If they solved it they would get off, and
get a bride to boot; otherwise ...
The first day there were three trials. In all three, the king
explained, the prisoner had to open one of two rooms. Each room
contained either a lady or a tiger, but it could be that there
were tigers or ladies in both rooms.
On each room he hung a sign as follows:
I II
In this room there is a lady In one of these rooms there is
and in the other room a lady and in one of these
there is a tiger rooms there is a tiger
"Is it true, what the signs say ?", asked the prisoner.
"One of them is true", replied the king, "but the other one is false"
If you were the prisoner, which would you choose (assuming, of course,
that you preferred the lady to the tiger) ?
-------------------------
For the second and third trials, the king explained that either
both statements were true, or both are false. What is the
situation ?
Signs for Trial 2:
I II
At least one of these rooms A tiger is in the
contains a tiger other room
Signs for Trial 3:
I II
Either a tiger is in this room A lady is in the
or a lady is in the other room other room
Representing the problems is much more difficult than finding the
solutions. The latter two test a sometimes ignored aspect of the
[Prolog] language.
Have fun !
------------------------------
Date: 27 Nov 1983 20:42:46-EST
From: Mark.Fox at CMU-RI-ISL1
Subject: AI talk
[Reprinted from the CMU-AI bboard.]
TITLE: Databases and the Logic of Business
SPEAKER: Ronald M. Lee, IIASA Austria & LNEC Portugal
DATE: Monday, Nov. 28, 1983
PLACE: MS Auditorium, GSIA
ABSTRACT: Business firms differentiate themsleves with special products,
services, etc. Nevertheless, commercial activity requires certain
standardized concepts, e.g., a common temporal framework, currency of
exchange, concepts of ownership and contractual obligation. A logical data
model, called CANDID, is proposed for modelling these standardized aspects
in axiomatic form. The practical value is the transportability of this
knowledge across a wide variety of applications.
------------------------------
Date: 30 Nov 83 18:58:27 PST (Wednesday)
From: Kluger.PA@PARC-MAXC.ARPA
Reply-to: Kluger.PA@PARC-MAXC.ARPA
Subject: HP Computer Colloquium 12/1/83
Professor Roman Lopez de Montaras
Politecnico Universidade Barcelona
A Learning System for Linguistic Categorization of Soft
Observations
We describe a human-guided feature classification system. A person
teaches the denotation of subjective linguistic feature descriptors to
the system by reference to examples. The resulting knowledge base of
the system is used in the classification phase for interpetation of
descriptions.
Interpersonal descriptions are communicated via semantic translations of
subjective descriptions. The advantage of a subjective linguistic
description over more traditional arithmomorphic schemes is their high
descriptor-feature consistency. This is due to the relative simplicity
of the underlying cognitive process. This result is a high feature
resolution for the overall cognitive perception and description
processes.
At present the system is still being used for categorization of "soft"
observations in psychological research, but application in any
person-machine system are conceivable.
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End of AIList Digest
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