robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (06/22/84)
References: >> Q: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a sheep have? >> A: Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. I find this answer less satisfactory than the two given below. It seems to me that "calling an X a Y" is exactly how we define what most things are. SO: A: One. A tail is leg, those other four things are obviously something else. OR: A: Five. If you call it a leg, it is a leg (albeit of a different kind), in addition to those other four legs. - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison princeton!eosp1!robison
REID%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA (07/18/84)
Regarding the Fahrenheit/Celcius problem (if 32 is 0 and 212 is 100 ...). Even there, the "obvious" answer is only obvious due to cultural biases. A computer might indeed solve the problem without "blinking an LED," but the answer it would likely to come up with is NOT what we think of as obvious. Simply put, the "data" given fits equally well with the hypothesis that the mapping is just the lower 3 (or 4) order bits of the binary representation of the first number. It would seem to me that a computer would be more likely to hit upon this mapping, unless it were endowed with a lot of "common sense" and (human) cultural information. --- Reid Simmons ---