deng@shire.cs.psu.edu (Mingqi Deng) (04/15/90)
One thouhgt that has been in the back of by head and I think it is
interesting to have some discussion on it.
Suppose that Ms. Wonder (disclaimer: she is not a relative of
Wonder woman) built a chess-machine (perhaps a computer program)
called MisChess. MisChess has exhibits a master-level chess-skill
and chess-learning ability. Ms. Wonder has kept it secret how
MisChess works. Then Ms. Wonder misteriously vanished. Every
top-rank scientist in the world has been consulted since and yet
nobody is able to unveil the secret.
Question 1: is MisChess intelligent as far as chess is concerned?
Question 2: Mr. Artistein managerd to obtain the design of MisChess.
It turned out to be a simple architecture: a set of units and
connections with varible connection strength, and a small set
of rules governing the change of connection strengths. However,
there are 10 millions of units and 10 billion of connections.
Mr. Artistein comes to Mr. Compstein for help since he has
access to the world's fastest computer. Mr. Compstein's
computer prints out a message after 1 second: the following
envirnment variables undefied and a list of the variables
(the list stopped at 10 million-th since Mr. Compstein ran out
of printer paper). So they consulted human-development expert
Mr. Environstein. He pointed out that they need to duplicate
exactly the same environment MisChess experienced in order to
explain how MisChess reached its particular layout of
connections. Mr. Artistein has since worked hard with his
10,000,000 students on duplicating the environement which
fortunately is hinted by a diary left by Ms. Wonder.
While they are still working on the project, scientists,
laywers, human and machine rights groups over the world are
enganged in heated discussion as whether MisChess can be
considered as intelligent as we are.
So, what is your opinion?
Mingqi
deng@shire.cs.psu.edu
deng@psuvaxs.BITNET
deng@psuvax1.UUCP