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Article 6469 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Defining intelligence
Message-ID: <BILL.92Jul16195334@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
Date: 17 Jul 92 02:53:34 GMT
References: <1992Jul8.092458.3088@otago.ac.nz> <1992Jul16.203118.16680@dcs.qmw.ac.uk>
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Organization: ARL Division of Neural Systems, Memory and Aging, University of
	Arizona
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In-Reply-To: abreu@dcs.qmw.ac.uk's message of 16 Jul 92 20: 31:18 GMT

abreu@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Abreu) writes:

   Now my point is that you don't build a house, write a novel, etc.
   by searching the possibility space. The actual space is of such
   huge proportions, that its limits are inexistent: the space of
   houses that can be built, the space or novels that can be written,
   etc. is actually infinitely large. And this is just the space that
   is meaningful to us (high value.) Either the heuristics we use to
   search such spaces are tremenduosly powerful, or they are tremen-
   duously limiting, preventing us from doing effective searches.
   I can't see other explanations to the problem of searching an
   infinitely large space.

I agree entirely.  Meaningful problems can almost never be solved by
brute-force search.  It is necessary to use techniques to reduce the
size of the search space; much of the classical research in AI was
devoted to finding such techniques -- for example, dividing the
problem in subproblems, finding subgoals, finding a way to measure
progress toward the goal, pruning, etc.  It is still quite an active
research area.

When you are writing a novel, you have a set of goals in mind: to make
money, to communicate an idea, to change the world, maybe just to
express yourself.  You begin by dividing the problem: you decide what
each individual chapter is going to accomplish.  You also decide upon
the best way to order the chapters; this is a search problem.  For
each chapter, you subdivide into sections; for each section, into
paragraphs; and for each paragraph, into sentences, facing new content
and ordering problems at each level.  Writing a sentence requires
finding the right words and arranging them in the right order; this is
yet another search problem.

	-- Bill


