From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!samsung!uunet!boulder!tigger!tesar Tue Jan 28 12:15:06 EST 1992
Article 2963 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: tesar@tigger.Colorado.EDU (Bruce Tesar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Impossibility of flight vs impossibility of AI
Message-ID: <1992Jan21.192341.13109@colorado.edu>
Date: 21 Jan 92 19:23:41 GMT
References: <1992Jan21.144204.29245@oracorp.com> <63030@netnews.upenn.edu>
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In article <63030@netnews.upenn.edu> weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener) writes:
>In article <1992Jan21.144204.29245@oracorp.com>, daryl@oracorp writes:
>>I was trying to make an analogy between artificial intelligence and
>>artificial flight. Considering birds and bees as evidence for the
>>possibility of an artificial flying machine is comparable, in my
>>opinion, to considering humans as evidence of the possibility of an
>>artificial thinking machine.
>
>You were making an analogy with artificial intelligence _via digital
>computation_.
>
>Moreover, you were making the analogy in response to someone on the
>anti-AI warpath.  The two situations are not very comparable.  Where,
>in 1890, could one point to four decades of enthusiastic but uncon-
>vincing artificial flight attempts?
>-- 
>-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu)

    Matt is probably right; by 1890, enthusiastic and unconvincing
artificial flight attempts spanned far more than four decades.

See: "The Invention of The Airplane", Gary Bradshaw and Marsha Lienert,
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive
Science Society, Aug., 1991.

-- 
Bruce B. Tesar                    Internet:  tesar@cs.colorado.edu
Computer Science Department
University of Colorado at Boulder 
Boulder, CO  USA  80309-0430


