Emil Huston wrote: > > WARNING! > The following quote should be read only by people who can imitate Emil's heavy > East European accent (close enough to the East Indian one..) > > "There is more to life than increasing speed" > Mohandas Gandhi Hi Emil - Glad to see you have more time on your hands these days (g). With that in mind, I thought you might enjoy this exchange of listserv chitchat from some colleagues across the drink. WARNING: The following should be read only by people who can imitate Monte Python and Margaret Thatcher's heavy British accents. ..................................... BRITISH CARTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY DESIGN GROUP. OCCASIONAL NOTES 1 >From time to time esoteric items are raised at our various meetings and get-togethers that prompt correspondence and emails. These are rarely learned pontifications but more whatever came into some cartographers mind whilst they were in the shower. However, these asides have often led to more formal research and design projects if we feel that the subject needs further investigation. Regards Alan Collinson Design Group Co Convenor NOTES ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND EXPERT SYSTEMS (Correspondence) As you know there is no such thing as an expert system, just as there can be no such thing as artificial intelligence. Electronic impulses can't think. It was a philosopher called Sharp I believe, who invented the paradigm 'Squiggle, Squiggle, Squoggle, Squoggle' What he meant was that a computer is programmed to respond to commands and no more, it has no understanding of what those commands mean. Even in those cases where it is programmed to learn from itself. If it gets a command squiggle-squiggle, its response is squoggle-squoggle, but it does not know there is a difference between sqiggle and squoggle. There was a little game I used to play to illustrate this. A small chessboard with four or five squares on each side was used by counters from opposing sides. The object was to get your counter to the other end without being stalled. Each counter could move in a number of directions at will, and a set of match boxes was used with the moves written inside. By one simple device this 'computer can never be beaten. Of the moves possible at each stage you take out the final move which lost so that it can never make that move again. Bit by bit only winning combinations are left. The computer has become 'intelligent', but if this is intelligence I'm a squoggle. However I am aware that greater minds than mine have come to the opposite conclusion. ..................................... I was intrigued by your squiggles, one day you will have to show me your chess game. By my reckoning the computer would eventually discount every move and decide the only safe option was not to move at all. Much the same as cartography has. I smiled when I read that there can be no such thing as artificial intelligence because electronic impulses can't think :-) On the contrary, thought is nothing more than electronic impulses, and all intelligence is naturally occurring and self propagating. Chew on that one. ......................... When we were writing about artificial intelligence you said "I smiled when I read that 'there can be no such thing as artificial intelligence because electronic impulses can't think' . On the contrary, thought is nothing more than electronic impulses, and all intelligence is naturally occuring and self propagating." Come off it Sunshine! Whatever thought is, it is a gread deal MORE than electronic impulses. There may be an arguement in favour of artificial intelligence but this isn't it. And surely your second proposition 'that it's all natural and self propagating' excludes any possibility of the artificial. My opinion may be wrong but crap thinking like this will never prove it. (OOps! poke in the eye and knee in the goolies next time we meet?) ................ And now, Mr. Know-It-All, just who do you accuse of "crap thinking"??!! Big Sigh. I wonder if Einstein ever suffered the ignorance of fools. ;-) Read it again and think about it this time. :-) You said "there is no such thing as artificial intelligence because electronic impulses can't think" and I replied that "thought is nothing more than electronic impulses, and all intelligence is naturally occurring and self propagating." I'm not sure I could make it any clearer. What I was hoping to illuminate was the irony that the "artificial" intelligence of computers is not artificial but is instead a natural product of human intelligence. In the human brain one thought is followed by another thought, with the connecting string being human experience. That is why I think of Bram Stoker when I see the OS crossed off your Christmas card list (nice touch, by the way!). The thing which separates human thought from computer logic is the ability for humans to have original thoughts by linking previously unrelated thoughts. And more than that, the ability to recognise a useful thought from a nonsensical thought. (...maybe I should stop now!) The human existence is conditioned and moulded by cause and effect - an easy enough concept for a computer to understand. Computers can be taught to use their limited experiences to react in the most appropriate way to unfamiliar circumstances. So can you not imagine that in 30 years we will see the creation of computers with the capacity for real thought, not just artificial intelligence? And perhaps, one day, computers with the ability to propagate original thoughts from those thoughts we implanted in them? And as you found at your party, humans have the ability to build not only on their own experience, but also the experience of previous generations. Imagine how much more quickly a computer could learn with access to a global database of human experience like the internet. I have no doubt that you think original thought requires more than electrical impulses? Next I'll be trying to persuade you that the soul is nothing more than a chemical imbalance. ;-) It makes me want to go and read Douglas Adams. ..................................... The connecting string between thoughts being human experience is also a good way of putting it, but I am still unsure about your idea that the thing which separates human thought from computer logic is the ability to link previously unrelated thoughts. For two reasons. Human experience is not the same as linking previously unrelated thoughts, and, to my mind, to jump from this to the assumption that when a computer is bringing together unrelated things, it is having thoughts, is to move the goalposts very decidedly in the computers favour. It is not as though I have a fear that computers will eventually surplant my feeble reasoning capacity. I love these things that can do things I can't do, and can do the things I can do a 1000 times the speed. But that is not the issue. Computers will not, as you suggest, be able to propagate thoughts in thirty years time from the thoughts we implanted in them because what we inplanted were not thoughts. Again you do the same thing with cause and effect. True this can easily be juggled by a computer, but surely human experience is not conditioned and moulded by merely this. My feeling is that there other factors which mould us which relegate cause and effect to the sidelines. If this is all human existence is then, to be sure, a computer can handle it after a fashion, (cause, an impulse; effect, a discharge) but in order to compare this with real human existence the goalposts have to be so narrow that only an ant could squeeze through. What about the Desire, the Will, what about fear, what about Love, what about Bruce's spider. And above all, what about haggis neaps and tatties for tea. I would do anything for a plateful right now, not just because of what they taste like but for the emotions and images they invoke in me. Once I have had them I want to become world curling champion, throw the caber, walk the Royal Mile and hold my kilt above my head. This is thinking, this is human experience motivating future outcomes. This is the Bram Stoker effect. I gave my computer a haggis and it threw up! As for the soul, lets not get into that one or we will be here for ever. One thing I know above all else. Computers have no souls. Just at the moment you say to yourself "Please don't crash now" They do. .................................. THE END SO FAR OVER TO YOU ................................... Food for thought, hey? Emil, do you know what "goolies", "tatties", and "haggis neaps" are? Cheers, Cindy