presented problems, that is so constrained (for example by beingJames: The point here is good, but Im not convinced that this describes "understanding" so much as it describes "learning" where the knowledge about a thing or process can better let it know about another object or thing that is related.
extremely concise) that the only way it could have existed
is if it is based on an ingenious abstraction hierarchy with modules
exploiting real structure in the world and reused in different
contexts to solve different problems, then it will continue to solve most new problems, its modules
may be said to have meaning (this is what meaning is, they basically
define meaning), it can be said to understand the world in the sense
that it will solve in a robust way new problems and variations,
and this basically is what the empirical phenomenon colloquially
called understanding is.
This does not handle the account where you can "understand" a single object, without relation to the rest of the world.
James Ratcliff
Eric Baum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> I meant, code in some constrained language (for example,
>> constrained by being very concise) that solves so many different
>> problems that such constrained code wouldn't exist unless it was
>> fundamentally exploiting structure underlying the problem-- code
>> exemplifying my generalized Occam's Razor hypothesis.
Michael> Would you include typical VM bytecode
Michael> (e.g. JVM/.NET/Parrot/Emacs Lisp/etc) in that class, or does
Michael> it need to be more specialised? How about a
Michael> Huffman-compressed version of the code causality graph, from
Michael> the basic operators (and library functions if applicable) up?
Obviously, if you take some code, and simply compress it, it won't
understand any better. And if you expand it, but it does precisely the
same thing, for example by inserting comment statements, or junk dna,
it won't understand any worse.
Also, running any *fast* generic compressor, such as
winzip won't generally extract the structure needed.
I am arguing that if you find a code that solves a range of naturally
presented problems, that is so constrained (for example by being
extremely concise) that the only way it could have existed
is if it is based on an ingenious abstraction hierarchy with modules
exploiting real structure in the world and reused in different
contexts to solve different problems,
then it will continue to solve most new problems, its modules
may be said to have meaning (this is what meaning is, they basically
define meaning), it can be said to understand the world in the sense
that it will solve in a robust way new problems and variations,
and this basically is what the empirical phenomenon colloquially
called understanding is.
Michael> Michael Wilson, Director of Research and Development,
Michael> Bitphase AI Ltd Web demos page: http://www.bitphase.com/apex
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