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Article 1670 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: infidel@maths.uwa.oz.au (INFIDEL)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: The Philosophical Foibles of John McCarthy
Message-ID: <1991Nov27.143242.5886@uniwa.uwa.oz.au>
Date: 27 Nov 91 14:32:42 GMT
References: <1991Nov25.235301.5346@leland.Stanford.EDU>
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francis@hanauma.stanford.edu (Francis Muir) writes:

>Luke Wagner (?) writes:

>	Francis Muir writes:

>		John McCarthy writes:

>			In a BBC debate with Professor Lighthill, I tried 
>			to make an analogy saying, "Physicists haven't solved 
>			the problems of turbulence in 100 years and aren't 
>			giving up".  

>			I was flabbergasted by Lighthill's reply, "They should 
>			give up".  

>		But back to the point. What makes AI and Turbulence so 
>		interesting for me, and, apparently, so dangerous to some 
>		others, is their shared sense of misdirection. It is not 
>		the solutions that are troublesome but the feeling that the 
>		problems are improperly posed. 

>	Is there anyone specific whose work in turbulence you find 
>	particularly misdirected?  

>Some of the Chaos Theory Boys thought they were going to make a killing
>in Turbulence.

>	Is there any way to pose the problem that will save all the poor 
>	sots working on it?
>	
>God no! That's the attraction of it. Properly positing the questions is what
>science is all about. 

>	Turbulence doesn't seem to carry much of the ideological baggage
>	attached to AI, and proponents of this or that approximation
>	scheme are rarely bothered by soi-disant philosophers about 
>	sinister implications. 

>I don't know what motivated John McCarthy's choice of Turbulence as an
>example, but I might imagine that he has heard enough discussion of the
>subject at The Member's Table at the Faculty Club to realize that it is
>a lively subject of debate. For myself, all I can say is that in my own 
>work with Lattice Boltzmann modeling  I use Reynolds' Numbers at least
>10 orders of magnitude too small to be able to make a useful contribution
>to the discussion -- except to say that turbulence does not scale!
					^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

>							FM

Not on one of them Lattice Boltzmann toys, it doesn't. Get real! Get
yourself a fishtank plus hotplate and paddle frills ...


jw


