From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!torn!utcsri!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdat!swf Tue Jun 23 13:21:05 EDT 1992
Article 6299 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!torn!utcsri!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdat!swf
>From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Re: Transducers
Message-ID: <492@tdat.teradata.COM>
Date: 17 Jun 92 22:19:01 GMT
References: <1992Jun12.022620.22946@news.Hawaii.Edu>
Sender: news@tdat.teradata.COM
Reply-To: swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit
Lines: 39

In article <1992Jun12.022620.22946@news.Hawaii.Edu> roitblat@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Herbert Roitblat) writes:
|
|If these hypotheses are mutually exclusive then they cannot both be
|true simultaneoulsy. 

Yes, *if* they are mutually exclusive.  Are they?

|An automobile is about as far from a computational core device as one
|can get.  When one presses on the brake, energy is transferred from
|the brake pedal via a series of levers and hydraulic hoses to the
|brake shoes or discs.

But that is only a feature of *existing* implimentations, there is no
reason they *have* to be implemented that way.

| If the car had a computational core, a signal
|would travel from the brake to the core and from the core to the
|device.

Hmm, I seem to remember something about a new kind of brake system.
called 'non-skid brakes' that work just this way!

Certainly I see no reason why one *couldn't* build a car that way,
after all, they built the F-16 that way!

|>Surely pattern recognition is a computational task of enormous
|>complexity.
|
|
|Surely you are correct.  Nevertheless being committed to computation
|does not commit one to a certain computational architecture.
Quite.  In fact I see you as the one commited to a particular
computtional architecture!  The distributed one!  What we are saying is
that if the core of intelligence is computational, then the *physical*
design details do *not* matter, except as they effect efficiency or speed.
-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com


