marek@INDIANA.CSNET ("Marek W. Lugowski") (02/10/86)
From: "Marek W. Lugowski" <marek%indiana.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA> > [Stan Shebs:] In article <3600036@iuvax.UUCP> marek@iuvax.UUCP writes: > ...one of the most misguided AI efforts to date is > taxonomizing a la Michalski et al: setting up categories along arbitrary > lines dictated by somebody or other's intuition. If AI does not have > the mechanism-cum-explanation to describe a phenomenon, what right does it > have to a) taxonomize it and b) demand that its taxonomizing be recognized > as an achievement? > > I assume you have something wonderful that we haven't heard about? I assume that you are intentionally jesting, equating that which I criticize with all that AI has to offer. Taxonomizing is a debatable art of empirical science, usually justified when a scientist finds itself overwhelmed with gobs and gobs of identifiable specimens, e.g. entymology. But AI is not overwhelmed by gobs and gobs of tangible singulars; it is a constructive endeavor that puts up putatative mechanisms to be replaced by others. The kinds of learning Michalski so effortlessly plucks out of the thin air are not as incontrovertibly real and graspable as instances of dead bugs. One could argue, I suppose, that taxonomizing in absence of multitudes of real specimens is a harmless way of pursuing tenure, but I argue in Indiana U. Computer Science Technical Report No. 176, "Why Artificial Intelligence is Necessarily Ad Hoc: Your Thinking/Approach/Model/Solution Rides on Your Metaphors", that it causes grave harm to the field. E-mail nlg@iuvax.uucp for a copy, or write to Nancy Garrett at Computer Science Department, Lindley Hall 101, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47406. > Or do you believe that because there are unsolved problems in physics, > chemists and biologists have no right to study objects whose behavior is > ultimately described in terms of physics? > > stan shebs > (shebs@utah-orion) TR #176 also happens to touch on the issue of how ill-formed Stan Shebs's rhetorical question is and how this sort of analogizing has gotten AI into its current (sad) shape. Please consider whether taxonomizing kinds of learning from the AI perspective in 1981 is at all analogous to chemists' and biologists' "right to study the objects whose behavior is ultimately described in terms of physics." If so, when is the last time you saw a biology/chemistry text titled "Cellular Resonance" in which 3 authors offered an exhaustive table of carcinogenic vibrations, offered as a collection of current papers in oncology?... More constructively, I am in the process of developing an abstract machine. I think that developing abstract machines is more in the line of my work as an AI worker than postulating arbitrary taxonomies where there's neither need for them nor raw material. -- Marek Lugowski