paul@ism780.UUCP (05/17/84)
#R:wxlvax:-27600:ism780:20200001:000:1385 ism780!paul May 15 21:04:00 1984 ***** ism780:net.philosophy / wxlvax!rlw / 9:28 am May 15, 1984 > It seems that it is IMPOSSIBLE to ever build a computer that can truly > perceive as a human being does, unless we radically change our ideas > about how perception is carried out. > The reason for this is that we humans have very little difficulty > identifying objects as the same across time, even when all the features of > that object change (including temporal and spatial ones). Computers, > on the other hand, are being built to identify objects by feature-sets. > But no set of features is ever enough to assure cross-time identification > of objects. There are 3 kinds of people in the world: one type believe that humans are fundamentally different than computers; another type believe that humans are computers only slightly more complicated than the ones in the big AI labs; the third type (which I happen to belong to) believe that human brains are fundamentally computers, but that AI research has barely scratched the surface of revealing what powerful computers they are. I would think that once objects can be identified in the first place, "cross-time identification" by computer (to the same extent that humans can do it) is *relatively* simple. It's simply a matter of research being focused (currently) on specific parts of the general AI problem of "machine perception". -- Paul Perkins
rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (05/18/84)
There's a fourth type of person: one who doesn't know if humans are machines and who can't hold any of the 3 beliefs. The "problem of object identification" is merely a synonym for the "problem of machine perception". The adequacy of a scheme of descrip- tion for an object depends on what you want the machine to DO with that object. The problem is we not only lack ingenious descriptive schemes for objects for performing even simple perceptual for even simple perceptual skills, but we don't really know (in explicit rigorous terms) what these skills are that make human perception possible.