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From: rhh@research.att.com (Ron Hardin <9289-11216> 0112110)
Subject: Re: Does AI make philosophy obsolete?
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Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ
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Date: Mon, 2 Oct 1995 19:55:50 GMT
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John McCarthy writes:
>You missed the point about elaboration tolerance.  You can set up each
>of the modified problems and the computer can go through the cases.  I
>want the computer to set up the modified problems, given in a sentence
>in English or logic that only describes the modification, not the
>modified problem.  Thus you can understand, "There is an oar on each
>bank of the river, and a boat can be propelled by one person with one
>oar but two oars are required if the boat is to carry two people".

Well, I'm not sure where you want the intelligence, in the socalled
natural language or in the computation.

If you do a state space search, every new condition just adds
a constraint on what the legal transitions are, and comes out
one line of code for one new condition.  I mean, since the BDD
does no reasoning, it is quite indifferent to the addition of
roadblocks.

BDD searches are also indifferent to fan-out, so I think would not
even be affected by the addition of oars.

If you think you can do natural language processing, take a little
while reading Quirk et al, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English
Language, Longmann Group Ltd, 1986, and imagining how in the world
you'd capture a fraction of it, over coffee.

I mean really do it, it's interesting.

(If you're compromising what you'll accept, I'm not sure what the claim
would be for it.)
