gideon%edai.edinburgh.ac.uk@CS.UCL.AC.UK (Gideon Sahar) (02/10/86)
From: Gideon Sahar <gideon%edai.edinburgh.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk>
EDINBURGH AI SEMINARS
Date: Wednesday, 12th February l986
Time: 2.00 p.m.
Place: Department of Artificial Intelligence
Seminar Room - F10
80 South Bridge
EDINBURGH.
Professor Donald Michie, The Turing Institute, Glasgow will give a
seminar entitled - "Artificial Concept Formation".
The approach develops from a position taken in the 1950's by H.A. Simon.
He proposed, in essence, a new criterion for the adequacy of a theory
(he considered economic theory), namely that in explaining the flux of
transactions a theory must take full account of the resource-limited
nature of the calculations performed by the participating agents. Is
economic man rational in the sense of making fully rational choices
whatever the computational cost (as in the von Neumann and Morgenstern
theory of economic behaviour), or does he exhibit at most the level of
rationality which human brains can feasibly compute in the time
available for each choice? By implication Simon also requires that
such a theory should be feasibly interpretable by its human user:
runnability on the machine is not enough.
This leads to the idea that what is run on the machine should be
human-oriented in a very strong sense, unprecedented in conventional
software technology even as an aspiration: if a program is to be not
just an operationally effective description or prescription, but a
machine representation of a concept and hence an eligible component of
a Simon-type theory, it must be not only human-intelligible but also
human-interpretable. This entails that the human expert skilled in
the given area must be able mentally to check it against trial data in
his head, just as he can in the case of his own professionally acquired
concepts.