Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!utgpu!pindor
From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Bag the Turing test (was: Penrose and Searle)
Message-ID: <D0GFxv.5zL@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <CzFr3J.990@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <D00167.91w@spss.com> <3bu0gs$fff@sun4.bham.ac.uk> <jqbD0DG73.4uu@netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 1994 19:10:42 GMT
Lines: 67

In article <jqbD0DG73.4uu@netcom.com>, Jim Balter <jqb@netcom.com> wrote:
>In article <3bu0gs$fff@sun4.bham.ac.uk>,
>Aaron Sloman <axs@cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:
>>Amongst my saved gems from usenet, I have the following, posted by
>>Cliff Joslyn cjoslyn@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu in comp.ai
>>Date: 1 Feb 90 02:38:23 GMT
>>saying:
>>| On p.  vi.  of the introduction to the classic anthology /Automata
>>| Studies/ (Annals of Math.  Studies # 34, Princeton U., 1956, including
>>| Kleene, von Neumann, Minsky, Moore, Shannon, Ashby, MacKay), Shannon and
>>| McCarthy say:
>>|
>>| "A disadvantage of the Turing definition of thinking is that it is
>>| possible, in principle, to design a machine with a complete set of
>>| arbitrarily chosen responses to all possible input stimuli.  Such a
>>| machine, in a sense, for any given input situation (including past
>>| history) merely looks up in a 'dictionary' the appropriate response.
             ^^^^^^
>>| With a suitable dictionary, such a machine would surely satisfy Turing's
>>| definition, but does not reflect our usual intuitive concept of
>>| thinking.  This suggests that a more fundamental definition must involve
>>| something relating to the manner in which the machine arrives at its
>>| responses -- something which corresponds to differentiating between a
>>| person who solves a problem by thinking it out and one who has
>>| previously memorized the answer".
>>
>>(I've not read the original, or checked the accuracy of the
>>transcription.)
>>
>>This point is frequently reinvented in one form or another. (My
>>summary is that intelligence is not concerned with WHAT one can do
>>but with HOW one does it.)
>
>This seems to me to involve an ambiguity about the word "thinking".  Some
>people, when faced with a quadratic equation, can with no or almost no
>conscious (!, ?) thought produce the answer.  On the other hand I, on
>occasion, have had to derive the quadratic formula because I couldn't remember
>it, and then "think out" the result of plugging in the values.  Does this make
>me more of a thinker than they?  "Thinking" and "thinking out" (or "conscious
>thought") do not seem to describe the same thing.  Any definition of thinking
>that tries to separate it from memory seems in error to me.  And you have moved
>from thinking to intelligence in your summary.  I can imagine accepting a
>definition of thinking as involving *how* far readily than I can a definition
>of intelligence.  Perhaps in the future we will have many different projects
>that have produced many different machines that use many different mechanisms
>to achieve similar ends.  If so, it is possible that the attempt to define
>thinking or intelligence in terms of *how* will be abandoned as futile.

Another problem, most often ignored by people pulling out of their sleeves
the HLT example (see "merely" above) is a complexity of a search algorithm
in this case. considering size and dimensionality of the database. Note 
that it has also to include past history of the conversation and a decision 
process which branch to take (this decision process would be a reflection of 
a "personality"). Personally I do not see any guarantee that a program 
utilizing HLT would be any simpler than a program generating the conversation.
Regardless, I do agree that stress on "how" is a mistake. Hans Moravec
argued this very convincingly in terms of optimization.

>-- 
><J Q B>

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
