From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!torn!utcsri!rpi!usc!sdd.hp.com!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!mp.cs.niu.edu!rickert Tue Jun 23 13:21:24 EDT 1992
Article 6330 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Subject: Re: 5-step program to AI
Message-ID: <1992Jun20.022757.31828@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
References: <60842@aurs01.UUCP> <1992Jun18.205639.3093@mp.cs.niu.edu> <60848@aurs01.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 20 Jun 1992 02:27:57 GMT
Lines: 60

In article <60848@aurs01.UUCP> throop@aurs01.UUCP (Wayne Throop) writes:
>> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)

>Ah.  My misinterpretation, then.  Back to chess.

>Computers generate many positions that are guaranteed to be reachable
>by legal play from the current position, and then evaluate them for
>strategic and tactical "goodness".

 Exactly.

>Humans, on the other hand, (seem to) generate a few positions that
>are guaranteed to have strategic and tactical "goodness", and then
>evaluate the possible paths from the current position towards them.

 Right.  This is where the superior recognition ability of the human
shows up.

>How it is that humans settle on the few positions that they do, and why
>it is so likely that they will indeed prove to be reachable from the
>current position without any untoward side-effects is a mystery.  It
>also doesn't seem to me to involve anything like "pattern recognition"
>except in the vaguest of ways.

  Your meaning of pattern recognition is evidently quite different from
mine.  I am not referring to well defined patterns that can be checked
in a point by point comparison.  Anything that is recurrent is some form
is a pattern, and the brain is remarkably good at discovering these
recurrent patterns (in some kind of learning process) and recognizing
them when they occur again.  And I don't mean conscious discovery and
conscious recognition.  Much of this occurs at unconscious levels.

>This is also analogous to the differences between how computers and
>humans approach "looking for math theorems".  The computer attempts at
>this I have seen described essentially generate lots of theorems and
>evaluate the "intreresting-ness" of the results.  (Granted, there is
>severe pruning, and attempts are made to only generate
>probably-interesting theorems, but the analogous situation is true of
>chess also.)  Humans, on the other hand, choose some interesting result
>by some means, and then try several strategies to show that the result
>is reachable from axioms.

  But once again the human finds it interesting because he recognizes,
perhaps not consciously, some familiar pattern.

>The computer and human approaches are as night and day.

  I have no disagreement with that.

>To the contrary, human master players evaluate far *DEEPER* than do
>computer players (at least, in the mid-game).  They are playing 13, 15,
>18 and more plys ahead.  Computers (at the time I read the articles in

  I tend to be skeptical about these types of depths.  The human player
may adopt a strategy which will not pay off for 18 moves, but I doubt that
he has carefully gone through and analyzed those 18 moves and the likely
responses to them all.  More likely he has recognized clear evidence
in the first two or three moves that this strategy puts him in the
offensive and will give the opponent difficulties.



