Henry%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA (08/02/84)
From: Henry Lieberman <Henry%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA> I see the fallacy as being that the word "decision" in the article connotes some willful decision of real significance to a human, such as "Should I vote for Reagan or Mondale?". The article confuses it in the lay reader's mind with the computer science sense of "decision", or primitive conditional, like "If this location is zero, I'll skip to the next instruction". Obviously, one decision of a person in the former sense may invovle zillions of primitive conditionals, so the human and machine "speeds" are not directly comparable. Why wait for the fifth generation? The Lisp machine I'm using right now is much smarter than a person, because a person can consciously consider only a few new subgoals every second, whereas a Lisp machine can do a million function calls a second.