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Article 3238 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Table-lookup Chinese speaker
Message-ID: <1992Jan29.021737.11424@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 29 Jan 92 02:17:37 GMT
References: <11828@optima.cs.arizona.edu> <1992Jan24.182738.7804@spss.com>
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In article <1992Jan24.182738.7804@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <11828@optima.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
>>No it isn't a good point.  "Repeated runs" are not part of the
>>experiement.  If you want to experiment today and again tomorrow, then
>>you have to come back tomorrow and start at the point where the
>>conversation left off.  Even if that point is "good bye", it will
>>still have a history of what has happened before.
>
>This prohibition of repeated runs seems to have no motivation besides 
>to allow the table-lookup machine.  If I had an intelligent algorithm in
>hand, I'd have no objection to repeated runs, to running multiple instances
>of the program, etc.  
>
>If you want to do the same thing with a human, just run him through the
>matter duplicator now being discussed on another thread.  I am confident
>that the conversations of the duplicates will not be identical (due to the
>accumulation of different experiences starting from the moment of
>duplication).

Repeated runs are a problem for any program that can be reset,
copied, rebooted, etc in such a way that it can be restarted from
some state it was in before.  It may be that nothing like that
can be done for humans.  For instance you may be right that a
copy would soon (if not immediately) diverge.  But I don't see
how we can avoid having it be possible for computers.


