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Article 3122 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Table-lookup Chinese speaker
Message-ID: <1992Jan24.172328.7312@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Jan 92 17:23:28 GMT
References: <1992Jan22.204734.20123@cs.yale.edu> <1992Jan23.221339.24355@aisb.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan23.215145.7979@husc3.harvard.edu>
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In article <1992Jan23.215145.7979@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:
>In article <1992Jan23.221339.24355@aisb.ed.ac.uk> 
>jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>
>>In article <1992Jan22.204734.20123@cs.yale.edu> 
>>mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU (Drew McDermott) writes:
>
>DMD:
>>>Now suppose you find a typewriter behaving this way.  Four hypotheses
>>>occur to you (in increasing order of probability):
>>>
>>>   1. It's a miraculous-coincidence system
>>>   2. It's a humongous-table system
>>>   3. AI has succeeded
>>>   4. There's a person on the other end
>>>
>>>Surely 1 and 2 are not serious contenders.  Hence although they are
>>>technically counterexamples to Behavioral Strong AI ("if it behaves as
>>>if it understands, then it does"), they are not really hypotheses that
>>>anyone would entertain.
>
>JD:
>>If we're inclined towards (3), all we should say is that AI has
>>suceeded in producing the behavior.  After all, there might be
>>different kinds of computer programs, some of which understand
>>and some of which don't, even if we don't go so far as table
>>lookup.
>
>Why isn't every computer program state-transition isomorphic to some table
>lookup device, perhaps augmented with an update routine?

By "table lookup" I had in mind the particular table lookup machine
that's been sugested as a thought experiment.

My point here was that if you conclude (3) what you've concluded
is that it's a program.  My suggestion is that there might be
different kinds of programs that can produce the observed behavior.

By "different kind" I don't mean that one's equivalent to some table
lookup and the other isn't, but rather that they might work in
different ways.  As a simple example, imagine programs that print
the permutations of the list (A B C).  One kind of program might
just have a list of all the permutations built into it, which it
could just print.  Another kind might have a procedure for
generating the permutations of a list and apply that to the list
(A B C).

-- jd


