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From: mantha@uffa.Berkeley.EDU (Surya Mantha)
Subject: Re: Does AI make philosophy obsolete?
Message-ID: <1995Oct6.134354.11778@news.wrc.xerox.com>
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Reply-To: mantha@uffa.Berkeley.EDU (Surya Mantha)
Organization: Xerox
References: <DFqyp6.9oD@research.att.com> <44pmlt$5pr@scotsman.ed.ac.uk> <JMC.95Oct4085621@Steam.stanford.edu>
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 13:43:54 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai:33926 comp.ai.philosophy:33492 sci.cognitive:9917 sci.psychology.theory:981

In article <JMC.95Oct4085621@Steam.stanford.edu>, jmc@Steam.stanford.edu
(John McCarthy) writes:

|>There are mixed systems.  Consider a xerox machine.  They have
|>computers in them these days, and their actions are conditional on
|>many factors.  However, their repertoire of actions does not permit
|>them to pay attention to what is written on the documents they are
|>copying.
|>-- 

Actually, that is not quite true. I believe there are copiers available
today that
can translate the text on the paper document (from Japanese to English
say) before
putting marks on paper. The notion of "glyphs" which allows documents to carry
their metadata/attributes with them in their paper rendition (or
representation) also 
enhances the processing capabilities of copiers. It is no longer about
making a copy 
of a paper document but transformation of a document in one medium to
that in another
medium (with arbitrarily complex processing of the information contained
in the document).

 
|>John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
|>*
|>He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
|>http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
|>
|>
                                
Surya Mantha
Systems Architecture
Xerox Corp.

