The point of most of this is humans and an AI would need to construct a 
imaginary world environment in their mind.  Most people make a typical 
elephant, and a typical chair and then interact the to as directed.

A blind person still gets its information from experience... if it reads about 
an elephant, it proabbly says a big animal the size of a car, and her 
experience lets her know abnout cars and animals, and she has sat in chairs and 
know how big they are.
But both of those are tied to the physical experences that she has.  You can 
only get so much from the words alone unless you have an infinite database 
where everything poeeible has been described fully.

But many many things can be gathered from the text alone as well.

James Ratcliff

Mike Dougherty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On 4/28/07, Mike Tintner  wrote:
> And what if I say to you: "sorry but the elephant did sit on the chair" -
> how would you know that I could be right?

I could assign a probability of truthfulness to this statement that is
dependant on how many other assertions you have made and the frequency
with which those assertions have proven to be accurate models of the
eventual reality they predicted or described.  If after a sufficient
number of occurrences of truthful assertions, there is a level of
trust associated to the believability of your future statements.
Suppose you intentionally lied to me.  Future probability assignments
would have to include the measurement of your proven inaccuracy.
Hopefully a system built on this principle has some failsafe for
statements like "I am lying."

> except in rare cases no such rules. You've actually made them up - and your
> brain did that for you by using its imagination. It's only by imagination
> that you can work out which of thousands of animals can or can't sit in a

Is imagination derived from earlier encounters with elephants and
chairs?  My original mental picture was a cartoonish elephant in an
equally cartoonish chair.  I had no details of weight or physics - I
assumed the elephant was the primary object of the sentence and
therefor the chair would need to accomodate the elephant.  If the
sentence were "the chair was sat on by an elephant" it would have
conjured a different meaning due to the primacy of the objects.  This
is where an unambiguous language would help prevent the parse errors
inherent in english (or possibly even human language in general)

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James Ratcliff - http://falazar.com
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