Trent, Feynman's page on wikipedia has it as: "If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood it." but Feynman reportedly said it in a number of ways, including the grandmother variant. I learned about it when taking physics classes a while ago so I don't have a very useful source info, but I remember one of my professors saying that Feynman also says it in his books. But yes, I did a quick search and noticed that many attribute the grandmother variant to Einstein (which I didn't know - sorry). Some attribute it to Ernest Rutherford, some talk about Kurt Vonnegut, and yes, some about Bible... Well, I guess it's not that important. But one of my related thoughts is that when teaching AGIs, we should start with very high-level basic concepts/explanations/world_model and not dive into great granularity before the high-level concepts are relatively well understood [/correctly used when generating solutions]. I oppose the idea of throwing tons of raw data (from very different granularity levels [and possibly different contexts]) at the AGI and expecting that it will somehow sort everything [or most of it] out correctly.
Jiri On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 3:39 AM, Trent Waddington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 6:20 PM, Jiri Jelinek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>>Trent Waddington wrote: >>>Apparently, it was Einstein who said that if you can't explain it to >>>your grandmother then you don't understand it. >> >> That was Richard Feynman > > When? I don't really know who said it.. but everyone else on teh > internets seems to attribute it to Einstein. I've seen at least one > site attribute it to the bible (but of course they give no reference). > > As such, I think there's two nuggets of wisdom here: If you can't > provide references, then your opinion is just as good as mine, and if > you can provide references, that doesn't excuse you from explaining > what you're talking about so that everyone can understand. > > Two points that many members of this list would do well to heed now and then. > > Trent > > > ------------------------------------------- > agi > Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now > RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ > Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com > ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
