KARP@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA (12/10/83)
From: Peter Karp <KARP@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA> I'd like to ask Mr. Fostel how biologists "do research in ways that seem different than physicists". It would be pretty exciting to find that one or both of these two groups do science in a way that is not part of standard scientific method. He also makes the following claim: ... the complexity of the commercial software I mentionned is MUCH greater than the usual problem attacked by AI people... With the example that: ... designing the reports and generating them for a large complex system (and doing a good job) may take a large fraction of the total time, yet such reporting is not usually done in the AI world. This claim is rather absurd. While I will not claim that deciding on the best way to present a large amount of data is a trivial task, the point is that report generating programs have no knowledge about data presentation strategies. People who do have such knowledge spend hours and hours deciding on a good scheme and then HARD CODING such a scheme into a program. Surely one would not claim that a program consisting soley of a set of WRITELN (or insert your favorite output keyword) statements has any complexity at all, much less intelligence or knowledge? Just because a program takes a long time to write doesn't mean it has any complexity, in terms of control structures or data structures. And in fact this example is a perfect proof of this conjecture.