Friday, July 6, 2007, YKY (Yan King Yin) wrote: YYKY> RM French's paper is fun to read, but my view is the exact opposite of his. YYKY> I also dislike Lakoff's stuff, which I think is time-wasting, YYKY> philosophical, and ineffectual (which doesn't mean I dislike him YYKY> personally).
YYKY> French's objection to PSSH (physical symbol system hypothesis) is mainly 2 YYKY> points: YYKY> 1. representations sometimes need to be context-dependent YYKY> 2. historically, successful systems had relied on hand-crafted YYKY> representations His argument is primarily against underestimation of problem of multiplicity of representations, specific incarnation of lurking combinatorial explosion problem. Approaches that don't address this problem have no direct way to move to actually start dealing with real world. The only way I see for systems not addressing this issue is what I wrote about in previous message: such system must be coded to be clever enough to do representation-selection 'manually' and I doubt it's doable. YYKY> His example is that "credit card" can be likened to "money", "doorkey", and YYKY> an almost infinite number of concepts. But this can be dealt with under YYKY> logic-based AI, using abductive reasoning or some kind of similarity-based YYKY> searching of the KB. Context-dependency is OK too, with abductive reasoning YYKY> -- for example, searching for the *explanation* of why a credit card can be YYKY> likened to a rose. Yes, reasonable approaches are certainly possible, nobody argues with that. But then again, how 'logic-based' that system will be after it starts using full-blown probabilistic searches? Search state can be regarded as a kind of subsymbolic knowledge representation in working memory. So there's no dichotomy. Main problem I see at this point of feature shift is that logic itself becomes unnecessary in such system. If logic rules to be applied are selected and act probabilistically, they are not much more than specific instances of more general concept activation rules. YYKY> My counter argument is: why don't you cite a scenario that will *break* the YYKY> logic-based AI model? If you can't, then you should join the LBAI camp YYKY> because it has many well-established results to build up on. =) It's like asking if I can argue that mind can't work on quantum physics or on a TM. Or course it can, which is beside the point. Such argument must be more context-specific to be fruitful :). -- Vladimir Nesov mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&id_secret=13841360-2b4455
