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Article 2802 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Impossibility of flight vs impossibility of AI
Message-ID: <62560@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 16 Jan 92 20:07:45 GMT
References: <1992Jan16.142652.7552@oracorp.com>
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Reply-To: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Organization: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology
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In-reply-to: daryl@oracorp.com

In article <1992Jan16.142652.7552@oracorp.com>, daryl@oracorp writes:
>>[about mental heuristics for doing mathematics]

>    there is no evidence that these heuristics are non-computable.

Sure there is: no algorithm is apparent to the mathematicians themselves.

>Computer science is only a few decades old, so it is no more valid to
>say that the nonexistence of good automatic theorem provers is
>empirical evidence for the impossibility of good automatic theorem
>provers than it would have been in 1890 to say that heavier-than-air
>flight was empirically impossible.

This analogy is bogus: it was known in 1890 that heavier-than-air
flight was empirically possible.
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu)


