From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ogicse!das-news.harvard.edu!husc-news.harvard.edu!zariski!zeleny Thu Feb 20 15:21:05 EST 1992
Article 3765 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ogicse!das-news.harvard.edu!husc-news.harvard.edu!zariski!zeleny
>From: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Look-up tables
Message-ID: <1992Feb15.114130.8837@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 15 Feb 92 16:41:29 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1992Feb15.114130.8837
References: <299C3CC6.15601@orion.oac.uci.edu>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
Lines: 74
Nntp-Posting-Host: zariski.harvard.edu

In article <299C3CC6.15601@orion.oac.uci.edu> 
schoi@teri.bio.uci.edu (Sam "Lord Byron" Choi) writes:

>I've been restraining myself for a couple months now from posting anything,
>hoping to catch up on the discussion before doing so, but I've found this
>an impossible task.
>
>It seems that the main argument in favor of a look-up table being able
>to defeat the turing test is based on the assumption that the number of
>possible conversation is limited.  The argument I have seen articulating
>this mentioned a human being's limited life span.
>
>Although it is true that the totality of any human being's conversations
>throughout a lifetime is necessarily finite in retrospect, this says nothing
>about the possible avenues of conversation at any particular point in
>an ongoing conversation.
>
>For instance:  Looking back at past conversation, I might have asked at one 
>point the question, "Is four evenly divisible by two?"  After I have asked this
>question, it only goes down as one of the many questions I have asked in
>my lifetime.  At the instant before I asked the question though, any number
>of variations could have been possible.  (e.g. "is five evenlydivisible by
>two," "is six evenly divisible by two," "is seven evenly divisible by two" etc).
>
>This possibility clearly defeats any attempt to construct a straight-forward
>look-up table.

I don't see why.  If an English lexicon were fixed in advance, we could
search through it word by word, deciding whether a given entry makes sense
as a meaningful successor of the previously recorded terms in a given
discourse fragment.  Two caveats are in order: the decision procedure may
have to ve non-effective (we use a human agent), and sufficiently liberal
meaningfulness criteria may have to be used in order to accomodate
cataphoric devices (unfulfilled would-be cataphora may be eliminated on the
second pass).

>In order to circumvent this, the programmer could take this structure and
>insert an algorithm to translate these words into numbers, calculate, and
>then retranlate back into English.  But at this point, the program is no
>longer a pure look-up table, includes programming routines which the
>programmer "gives" the program a notion of "meaning."  (i.e. a rudimentary
>translation of what "divisible" refers to).

No need: we just run through all possible integer names until a certain
pre-determined discourse length is exceeded.

>Of course, if I were the tester, I would turn around and ask "is a Hostess
>Ding-Dong divisible by two?" (admittedly not the most popular formulation
>of that question, but clearly understandable by human beings).

Clearly, our lexicon must include proper names such as the above.

>The main thesis is that although all the conversations in a lifetime are
>finite, the possible conversations are infinite since the question, before it
>is presented, is contingent.

Contingent, yet itself finite and bounded, and hence determinable in its
entire admissible variety.

>Sam Choi
>schoi@charity.sas.upenn.edu


`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'
: Qu'est-ce qui est bien?  Qu'est-ce qui est laid?         Harvard   :
: Qu'est-ce qui est grand, fort, faible...                 doesn't   :
: Connais pas! Connais pas!                                 think    :
:                                                             so     :
: Mikhail Zeleny                                                     :
: 872 Massachusetts Ave., Apt. 707                                   :
: Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139           (617) 661-8151            :
: email zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu or zeleny@HUMA1.BITNET            :
:                                                                    :
'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`


