All this talk about the letter "A" reminded me of something from Hofstadter:
"The problem of intelligence, as I see it is to understand the fluid nature of mental categories, to understand the invariant cores of percepts such as your mother’s face, to understand the strangely flexible yet strong boundaries of concepts such as “chair” or the letter “a“ … The central problem of (artificial intelligence) is the question: What is the letter ‘a’ and ‘i’? ...By making these claims, I am suggesting that, for any program to handle letterforms with the flexibility that human beings do, it would have to possess full-scale general intelligence." -- Douglas R. Hofstadter, from one of his Metamagical Themas articles The notion that we could ever capture the essence of "A-ness" has already been discussed at length and dismissed as impossible without an AI breakthrough. :-) MichKa
