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Article 2799 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: fb0m+@andrew.cmu.edu (Franklin Boyle)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Table-lookup Chinese speaker
Message-ID: <8dRT90C00Uh7M4Gr8l@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 16 Jan 92 20:59:44 GMT
Organization: Cntr for Design of Educational Computing, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 34

Jeff Dalton writes:

>>Now, the conversation "Hello."  "Ah, so we meet again, Professor Chung!"
>>(or rather its translation into Chinese) is indeed a possible conversation,
>>so it lives in the database.  But it's not appropriate.  The table lookup
>>algorithm is incapable of any sense of context.  There are simply too many
>>possible conversations at every point; all its replies will be nonsense.
 
>Don't be so sure of that.  Consider, where P is a person and C the computer:
 
>P: Hello.
 
>C: Ah, so we meet again, Professor Chung!
 
>P: I'm not Professor Chung!
 
>C: My mistake.  I'm sorry, Professor Han!
 
>P: But I'm not Han either!  Are you blind?
 
>C: I didn't think so, but I'm certainly having some trouble.

Actually, on a slightly different thread, given my discussion with Daryl
McCullough about his digestion analogy and the requirements one
stipulates for testing (and since he brought up the database of 
possible conversations), the above does not seem like a "sensible"
(Daryl's characterization) conversation with a computer given the 
input/output limitations. Through a teletype, the computer (or a human 
at the other end) could not tell who was saying hello. So, a more likely
sensible conversation that would be stored would be: 
"Hello." "Hello, could you please identify yourself?"
Sensibility also means conforming with the communication channel.

-Frank


