From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!wupost!uunet!psinntp!scylla!daryl Thu Feb 20 15:22:19 EST 1992
Article 3887 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
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>From: daryl@oracorp.com
Subject: Re: Humongous table-lookup misapprehensions
Message-ID: <1992Feb20.001246.18025@oracorp.com>
Organization: ORA Corporation
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1992 00:12:46 GMT
Lines: 42

Pontus Gagge writes (in response to Antun Zirdum):

>> And Pray tell, just what is "the intuitive concept of intelligence"?

> In superset relations: intuitive concept > interesting intelligence > 
> the ability to manage unforeseen situations.

> Part of the uninterestingness of the table-cheat lies in that it is 
> explicitly limited to passing the Turing Test; it has no capacities 
> for anything else.

By construction, the table lookup program would respond in a manner
indistinguishable from a human. Therefore, it has every bit as much
ability to manage *all* situations as a human would. Of course, given
the way the table is set up, there are no unforeseen situations,
because the table covers every possible situation a human can find
himself in.

> Another part lies in that it is a mere copy of its creator's
> intelligence, and not really an *artificial* intelligence.

> Generally, I would deem any "AI"-solution uninteresting if its
> development did not give us insight into the mechanisms of
> intelligence. A bit fuzzy, and perhaps tangential, but this is where
> *my* interest in AI is mainly centered.

Nobody is proposing the giant table lookup as a "solution" to AI;
everyone agrees that it is impossible to build in practice. I thought
the question at hand was philosophical; whether such a program should
be considered intelligent, conscious, capable of understanding, etc.
>From your telling of it, the table, in a sense, is the codification of
the mind of its creator, and so should be as intelligent, conscious,
etc.

In my opinion, the interesting, even astonishing, thing about a human
brain is that it manages, in a volume of about a liter, to encode the
same information that would take 10^(10,000,000,000) bits to encode in
the straight-forward way (in a table).

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY


