Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA (07/07/84)
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
This letter from Jim Horning was published in
the Open Channel column of IEEE Computer, July 1984, p. 90.
-- Ken Laws
The Future of Thinking for Non-Thinkers
There are a large number of people who are not prepared to think
(since thinking is often complex and unintegrated) but nonetheless
need the results of thinking. We can attack their problem in a
variety of ways:
* providing multiple-choice questionaires;
* observing the I/O behavior of real thinkers;
* developing natural language conventions that avoid the need
for thinking (cliches, etc.);
* publishing collections of real thoughts that can be combined
to suit the special needs of any occasion (Bartlett's, etc.);
* equipping a system with useful thoughts that determine whether
any of them are relevant to the current user (the prototype
will think about blocks);
* developing a fuzzy system that postpones the need for thinking
indefinitely;
* implementing a specialized system that contains only the thoughts
needed by a particular class of users and allows them to
personalize thoughts by discarding those they don't need; and
* setting up a system that selects the most efficient thought
for any occasion.
For a further breakthrough in the area, however, we must develop a
simple semantic model of thinking that can be directly implemented
on existing hardware. It must incorporate the behavior currently
exhibited by non-thinkers in the application areas and interact
gracefully with non-thinkers. We must not take thinkers as our model!
The thoughts produced must not be too sophisticated for naive users.
In each application, thoughts must be introduced gradually to
minimize disruption and to allow for imprecise thinking. The system
should evolve to the point where it handles all the routine thinking.
We must cater to maximum independence in thinking--separate thoughts
should not affect each other.
To plan our next step, we should look back to the last major
breakthrough in thinking: Euclidean geometry. Euclid believed that
the world was flat; this belief permitted significant simplification
in his thinking about the geometry of the world. Unfortunately,
many more recent "thinkers" have ignored this lesson and used more
complicated, spherical world models ...
Jim Horning
DEC Systems Research
130 Lytton Ave.
Palo Alto, CA 94301