jbn@GLACIER.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) (09/26/88)
Use of the term "common-sense reasoning" presupposes that common sense
has something to do with reasoning. This may not be the case. Many animals
exhibit what appears from the outside to be "common sense". Even insects
seem to have rudiments of common sense. Yet at this level reasoning seems
unlikely.
The models of behavior expressed by Rod Brooks and his artificial
insects (there's a writeup on this in the current issue of Omni), and by
Hans Moravec in his new book "Mind Children", offer an alternative. I
won't attempt to summarize that work here, but it bears looking at.
I would encourage workers in the field to consider models of common
sense that don't depend heavily on logic. There are alternative ways to
look at this class of problem. Both Brooks and Moravec use approaches
that are spatial in nature, rather than propositional. This seems to be
a good beginning for dealing with the real world.
The energetic methods Witkin and Kass use in vision processing are
another kind of model which offers a spatial orientation, an internal
drive toward consistency, and the ability to deal with noisy data. These
are promising beginnings for common-sense processing.
John Nagle