frisk@rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason) (07/19/90)
There has not been much discussion on my COMP.AI.PHILOSOPHY proposal on news.groups. I have received around 30 replies by mail, most of them positive, but one person insisted that the name should be talk.ai.philosophy. I disagree - and here is why.... Why split COMP.AI ? I want to see comp.ai split into two groups because some of the readers are not interested in the philosophical discussion, whereas others (including myself) are not interested in the rest of the articles in comp.ai. A division of comp.ai into two groups seemed a neat way to keep everybody happy. Creating a subgroup ".philosophy" simply seemed the most logical choice, because the philosophical discussion is - after all - just one aspect of AI. TALK vs. COMP I would never have suggested creating a talk group, as we do not receive them here in Iceland, and naturally I do not want to be cut off from the discussion. I would rather have things just as they are. But is this just another case of "basing a newsgroup name on distribution", like the sci.aquaria nonsense ? Well, no - not in my opinion. I am not proposing the creation of a new 'comp' but rather the split of an existing 'comp' group. This is not expected to lead to an increase in the total traffic in comp.*. The discussion in comp.ai.philosophy is perhaps not as technical as the discussion in comp.ai.neural-nets, but it is an equally important part of AI. The discussion is computer-related, which should be the primary criteria for selecting between 'comp' vs. 'talk'. My point of view: The discussion on the Chinese Room, TTT, symbol grounding etc. is already present in a 'comp' group. I am just proposing moving it to a separate, more appropriate subgroup. If the general consensus seems to be that this group belongs in 'talk' I will withdraw my proposal, making things just stand as they are. Somebody else would then be free to propose a 'talk' group of course. -frisk -- Fridrik Skulason University of Iceland | Technical Editor of the Virus Bulletin (UK) | Reserved for future expansion E-Mail: frisk@rhi.hi.is Fax: 354-1-28801 |