Raul.Valdes-Perez@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU.UUCP (02/16/87)
I believe it is wrong to say that the importance of formalization to AI is overstated; formalization is our secret weapon. Let's say that AI is the science of codifying human knowledge in an effective manner, where by effective is meant able to effect a result, rather than, say, listing on paper and hanging in a museum. Our secret weapon is formalization by embedding knowledge in a computer program, in accordance with our theories of how best to organize the embedding. We then run the program to test our theories. This embedding is a formalization; we are able to discover qualitative properties of the knowledge and organization by syntactic manipulation i.e. execution of the computer program. These qualitative properties would not otherwise be discovered by us because of our limited capacity to sustain complex thought. Programming may not seem formal, because few theorems follow from its exercise. This difficulty is due to our programming languages that lack useful mathematical properties. Our resulting insights are qualitative; nevertheless they are achieved by formalization. My conclusion is that everyone in AI believes in formalization, whether he knows it or not. -- Raul E. Valdes-Perez -- -- CMU CS --