hamscher@HT.AI.MIT.EDU (Walter Hamscher) (10/19/87)
Date: 18 Oct 87 01:39:46 GMT From: PT.CS.CMU.EDU!SPICE.CS.CMU.EDU!spe@cs.rochester.edu (Sean Engelson) Given a sufficiently powerful computer, I could, in theory, simulate the human body and brain to any desired degree of accuracy. * * * Don't forget to provide all the sensory input provided by being in, moving around in, and affecting the world. Otherwise you'll be simulating a catatonic. Do the terminally catatonic have minds?
hamscher@HT.AI.MIT.EDU (Walter Hamscher) (10/19/87)
Date: 17 Oct 87 22:09:05 GMT From: cbmvax!snark!eric@rutgers.edu (Eric S. Raymond) * * * I never heard of this line of research being followed up by anyone but Doug Lenat himself, and I've never been able to figure out why. He later wrote a program called EURISKO that (among other things) won that year's Trillion-Credit Squadron tournament (this is a space wargame related to the _Traveller_ role-playing game) and designed an ingenious fundamental component for VLSI logic. I think all this was in '82. See Lenat & J.S. Brown in AI Journal volume 23 #3, 1984: "Why AM and EURISKO Appear to Work". The punchline of the article (briefly) is that AM seems to have succeeded in elementary set theory because its own representation structures (i.e., lists), were particularly well suited to reasoning about sets. It started breaking down at exactly the places where its representation was inadequate for the concepts. For example, there was no obvious way to move from its representation of the number n as a list of length n, to a positional representation that would make it more likely to discover things like logarithms. Furthermore, its operations on procedures involved local modifications to procedures expressed as list structures, and as long as the procedures were compact these "mutations" were likely to produce interesting new behavior, but as the procedures get more complex, arbitrary random local modifications had a vanishingly low success ratio. Hence it would seem that direction to go from this insight is to make programs that can learn new representations. There are probably not enough people working on that. But anyway this is getting off the subject, which is whether AI has had any successes. Whether you want to count AM as a success is half-empty / half-full issue; the field surely learned something from it, but it surely hasn't learned esuRockw
nick@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU (10/26/87)
In article <193@PT.CS.CMU.EDU> spe@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Sean Engelson) writes: >Given a sufficiently powerful computer, I could, in theory, simulate >the human body and brain to any desired degree of accuracy. You are in good company. Laplace thought much the same thing about the entire physical universe. However, some results in chaos theory appear to imply that complex real systems may not be predictable even in principle. In a dynamic system with sufficiently 'sensitive dependence on intial conditions' arbitrarily large separations can appear (in the state space) between points that were initially arbitrarily close. No conceivable system of measurement can get around the fact that the behavior of the system itself 'systematically' erodes our information about its state. For a good intro to chaos theory, see the article by Farmer, Packard, et. al. in Scientific American December 86..
dickey@ssc-vax.UUCP.UUCP (10/27/87)
In article <8710260721.AA26918@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, nick@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU writes: > For a good intro to chaos theory, see the article by Farmer, > Packard, et. al. in Scientific American December 86.. Recently, on popular book on chaos has been published. Its title is "Chaos" and the author is Gleick. Sorry, I don't remember any more details. It seems to be a good book, but I don't have any idea if professional chaoticians would like it.
MFMISTAL@HMARL5.BITNET (11/02/87)
The august 1987 issue of the proceedings of the IEEE contains 9 papers on chaotic systems It has a tutorial for engineers, 3 papers with examples in electronic circuits, 2 papers on analytical tools and 3 papers on software and hardware tools. Jan L. Talmon University of Limburg, Dept. of Medical Informatics and Statistics. Maastricht, the Netherlands MFMISTAL@HMARL5.bitnet