🚀 go-pugleaf

This article is from "Spiros Triantafyllopoulos@386RANB" 
 and was received on Wed Jul 23 15:10:21 1986
 
>>>What is the theoretical or philosophical reason that these domains could not
>>>be extended to the larger but still limited ones that humans use?
>>
>>Nope. Expert systems have been known for behaving perfectly when faced
>>with situations for which the appropriate rule/action pairs exist. However,
>>expert systems can fail pretty miserably when faced with situations
>>beyond the scope of their knowledge.
>
>"Nope" to what???   I never said that expert systems could reason outside
>their domains, just that people can't either!!!! [.....]
>
Nope to the statement claiming the domain expansion, of course. Writing
an expert system for a limited domain, such as the one DEC uses to 
configure VAX systems, or MYCIN, can be done; but, how about expanding
said programs to more general applications within a given domain? 
Consider a pretty wide field, natural language understanding (where MOST
of the claims came from); is there a decent expert system for
understanding even a decent subset of English? The knowledge is there
(i.e. syntactic and grammatic rules, meanings, etc), but not the programs
for general-purpose understanding. Subset-wise, excellent programs for 
natural language applications (see smaller domains) such as database querying
do exist. And lots of research has been going on for years.
>
>>	People have been known for behaving (almost) perectly when faced
>>	with situations for which they have appropriate experience or
>>	knowledge.   However, common sense can fail pretty miserably when
>>	faced with situations outside of everyday experience.
>>
>Is not that just as true as your statement about expert systems?  Are you
>really trying to say that because humans have MORE "appropriate rule/action
>pairs" (i.e., knowledge or experience) that our common sense covers ALL
>situations in the universe?  Don't be silly!  I won't bore you with
>examples, because I'm sure you can come up with your own, but surely it is
>obvious that there are a great many situations not covered by human common
>sense.

No, I'm not silly :-). Do you challenge the superior human inference 
capabilities, which is mostly what "common sense" is all about?  
In the sciences field I have found out one too many times that simple 
knowledge and playing by the rules is not enough to justify a certain
action; inference based on that knowledge is needed. 
[...]
>However, how is reasoning on "VERY specialized problems" different from
>common sense?  Our "common sense" is limited to the domain of phenomena
>encountered in everyday human life, which is also very specialised in the
>grand scheme of things.

The domain mentioned just happens to be infinite, unless common life is
reduced to living in the Iron Curtain or Orwell's society. And computers
don't match with infinity. It is a very strange relationship, the one
between amount of knowledge/information and display of intelligence of any
sort. 

Expert systems perform best when confronted with HUGE amounts of information
or knowledge, more than a typical human can digest at a time. Consider the
VAX configurer: The last I read about it, it was keeping track of 100's
of parts, configurations, requirements, specs, etc. and a rigid
knowledge of how these go together. Of course, the program works fine. Compare
that with a human, that has to work with much less knowledge (at a given
time) available in his/her memory, (the brain may have large capacity,
but, how much can it retrieve at a time?), but with superior intellect,
who is then able to produce results of any worth. The expert system has
more knowledge/information available to it, but much less functionality
in its "inference engine".
>
>  And since when does common sense *not* do much good
>to, for example, doctors diagnosing diseases, or chemists trying to divine
>the structure of organic molecules from indirect data?  Again, I say that
>the difference between computer "common sense" and human "common sense" is
>that we haven't figured out enough of our common sense to tell it to a
>computer.  That's not a reflection on the computer.
>
For sure we don't know enough about how the brain functions or how 
knowledge is processed by humans. But, I will disagree about the common
sense point. How about insight? when all common sense says one thing and
the researcher does another, out of some kind of human feeling that is
irreproducible by computers? If common sense was the prime ingredient
for scientific research, we would all be Nobelaureates.

Common sense is (mostly) using existing knowledge, while insight or inference 
is the capability of creating new knowledge. As computers are not even coming
close to common sense, then geting them to infere is even furthest away.
===========================================================================

Some more thoughts regarding the rabbit computer: I saw on CNN news a clip
of 2 music videos urging teenagers NOT to make it. Both were for the Latin
American market, where, as the commentator said, there is a big problem
of teenager pregnancies. The titles were, if I am right, "when to say no"
or someting and "wait". What is even more outrageous is that both were paid
for by Uncle Sam Inc., thru a University (John Hopcins?) from taxpayer money.

Now this is as Orwelian as it can get. I seem to remember special songs
and games oriented against sexual activity in "1984".... Now we're in
1986 and we're really working our way there. So, Rabbit Co. comes late
(again). 

Spiros Triantafyllopoulos, GM Research Labs, Warren, Mi. (Spiros@GMR.COM)