amsler@FLASH.BELLCORE.COM (Robert Amsler) (07/03/87)
I think Don Norman's argument is true for cognitive psychologists, but may not be true for AI researchers. The reason is that the two groups seek different answers. If AI were only the task of finding out how people work, then it would be valid to regard armschair reasoning as an invalid form of speculation. One can study people directly (this is the old ``stop arguing over the number of teeth in a horse's mouth and go outside and count them'' argument). However, some AI researchers are really engineers at heart. The question then is not how do people work, but how could processes providing comparable performance quality to those of humans be made to work in technological implementations. `Could' is important. Airplanes are clearly not very good imitations of birds. They are too big, for one thing. They have wheels instead of feet, and the list goes on and on (no feathers!). Speculating about flight might lead to building other types of aircraft (as certainly those now humorous old films of early aviation experiments show), but it would certainly be a bad procedure to follow to understand birds and how they fly. Speculating about why the $6M man appears as he does while running is a tad off the beaten path for AILIST, but that process of speculation is hardly worthless for arriving at novel means of representing memory or perception FOR COMPUTER SYSTEMS. Lets not squabble over the wrong issue. The problem is that the imagery of the $6M man's running is just too weak as a springboard for much directed thought and the messages (including my own earlier reply) are just rambling off in directions more appropriate to SF-Lovers than AILIST. I do agree that the CURRENT discussion isn't likely to lead anywhere--but not that the method of armchair speculation is invalid in AI.
cottrell%ics@SDCSVAX.UCSD.EDU.UUCP (07/07/87)
In article <8707030236.AA29872@flash.bellcore.com> amsler@FLASH.BELLCORE.COM (Robert Amsler) writes: >I think Don Norman's argument is true for cognitive psychologists, >but may not be true for AI researchers. The reason is that the two >groups seek different answers. [....] Speculating about flight might >lead to building other types of aircraft (as certainly those now >humorous old films of early aviation experiments show), but it would >certainly be a bad procedure to follow to understand birds and how >they fly. In fact, the Wright Brothers spent quite a bit of time studying how birds fly, and as a recent Scientific American notes, we may still have a lot to learn from natural systems. A piece of Dennis Conner's boat was based on a whale's tailfin. I think Don's point was that many times AI researchers spend a lot of time theorizing about how humans work, and then use that as justification for their designs for AI systems, without ever consulting the facts. It is certainly true that Cognitive Scientists and AI researchers are at different ends of a spectrum (from NI (Natural Intelligence) to AI), but it would be foolish for AI researchers not to take hints from the best example of an intelligient being we have. On the other hand, it is not appropriate for a medical expert system to make the same mistakes doctors do - sometimes a criterion for a "good" cognitive model. gary cottrell Institute for Cognitive Science C-015 UCSD, La Jolla, Ca. 92093 cottrell@nprdc.arpa (ARPA) (or perhaps cottrell%ics@cs.ucsd.edu) {ucbvax,decvax,akgua,dcdwest}!sdcsvax!sdics!cottrell (USENET) ********************************************************************** THE FUTURE'S SO BRIGHT I GOTTA WEAR SHADES - Timbuk 3 **********************************************************************