Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife,comp.ai.philosophy,comp.ai,alt.consciousness
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!udel!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!vlsi_lib
From: vlsi_lib@netcom.com (Gerard Malecki)
Subject: Re: Thought Question
Message-ID: <vlsi_libD3LpyC.158@netcom.com>
Organization: VLSI Libraries Incorporated
References: <3gr29i$a0f@news.u.washington.edu> <3gvigc$g3h@nntp.Stanford.EDU> <D3L5M9.Gx4@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 1995 23:15:48 GMT
Lines: 37
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai.alife:2247 comp.ai.philosophy:25249 comp.ai:27150

In article <D3L5M9.Gx4@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>In article <3gvigc$g3h@nntp.Stanford.EDU> rubble@leland.Stanford.EDU (Adam Heath Clark) writes:
>
>>Yes, but I can't imagine a non-conscious entity that could converse with
>>me and talk about philosophy or consciousness. 
>
>Why not?
>
>It's easy enough now to have simple programs that converse about
>philosophy and converse, though far from convincingly.  So you
>should be able to imagine entities that do that w/o being conscious.
>So as we imagine entities that do better and better at such
>conversations, what sort of "better" is it that actually requires
>consciousness?  Can you say anything about this at all?
>
>-- jeff
>
>

Maybe this is the reason why the AI community is no longer interested
in TT passing programs as it was 20 years ago. I ams sure that, with
the current state of AI, a reasonably successful program could be written
using a sufficiently large data base of 'facts of everyday life', and a
template-driven model. Looks like the job has been left to amateurs,
witnessing the 100k prize that was talked about.

A more daunting task for AI is duplicating the mind of a mathematician
or a physicist. While programs written in prolog can do deductive
inferences orders of magnitude faster than mathematicians, none has
been able to come anywhere close to giving constructive proofs like
for Fermat's theorem or Gleason's theorem, two of the many triumphs
of the human mind. 


Shankar Ramakrishnan
shankar@vlibs.com

