gh%ai.toronto.edu@RELAY.CS.NET (Graeme Hirst) (10/31/86)
>A couple of years ago, on either this list or Human-Nets, there appeared >a short multiple-choice test which was written so that one could deduce >"best" answers based on just the form, not the content, of the questions ... The Ignorance Principle ("Forget the content, just use the form", or "Why clutter up the system with a lot of knowledge?") has a long and distinguished history in AI. In 1975, Gord McCalla and Michael Kuttner published an article on a program that could successfully pass the written section of the British Columbia driver's license exam. For example: QUESTION: Must every trailer which, owing to size or construction tends to prevent a driving signal given by the driver of the towing vehicle from being seen by the driver of the overtaking vehicle be equipped with an approved mechanical or electrical signalling device controlled by the driver of the towing vehicle? ANSWER: Yes. In fact, the program was able to answer more than half the questions just by looking for the words "must", "should", "may", "necessary", "permissible", "distance", and "required". The system was not without its flaws. For example: QUESTION: To what must the coupling device between a motor-vehicle and trailer be affixed? ANSWER: Yes. This is wrong; the correct answer is "frame". (This was an early instance of the frame problem.) The authors subsequently attempted a similar program for defending PhD theses, but the results were never published. REFERENCE McCalla, G. and Kuttner, M. "An extensible feature-based procedural question answering system to handle the written section of the British Columbia driver's examination". _CSCSI/SCEIO Newsletter_ [now published as _Canadian Artificial Intelligence_], 1(2), February 1975, 59-67. \\\\ Graeme Hirst University of Toronto Computer Science Department //// utcsri!utai!gh / gh@ai.toronto.edu / 416-978-8747