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- Path: sparky!uunet!ogicse!hp-cv!sdd.hp.com!decwrl!access.usask.ca!skorpio!choy
- From: choy@skorpio.usask.ca (I am a terminator.)
- Newsgroups: comp.ai
- Subject: Re: Eenie meenie
- Message-ID: <1992Aug19.195438.18764@access.usask.ca>
- Date: 19 Aug 92 19:54:38 GMT
- Article-I.D.: access.1992Aug19.195438.18764
- References: <1992Aug10.004119.16687@access.usask.ca> <24804@castle.ed.ac.uk>
- Sender: choy@skorpio (I am a terminator.)
- Organization: University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
- Lines: 31
- Nntp-Posting-Host: skorpio.usask.ca
-
- In article <24804@castle.ed.ac.uk>, cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
- |> In article <1992Aug10.004119.16687@access.usask.ca> choy@skorpio.usask.ca writes:
- |>
- |> >How do we make a decision? Why do we choose as we do? A neural net
- |> >will make it's decision based on the laws of physics. I think we
- |> >do too. .... We do whatever the universe dictates.
- |>
- |> Consider a chess-playing computer. In a trivial sense its next move in
- |> the game it is playing could be predicted from the laws of physics and
- |> a knowledge of its current state. In practice this would take grossly
- |> more computing power than is exercised by the device itself, by very
- |> many orders of magnitude. It would be much easier to predict it's next
- |> move from a listing of the code. And much easier again from a spec of
- |> the system and a knowledge of the laws of chess. But even here the
- |> unaided computational powers of a human being would be struggling to
- |> accomplish this prediction accurately in less than a few decades,
- |> although a good guess might be available in a few days.
- |>
- |> In other words, whether or not we do as the universe dictates is a
- |> rather airy theoretical distinction, since there is no way we can
- |> ever find out what the universe has dictated.
- |> --
- |> Chris Malcolm cam@uk.ac.ed.aifh +44 (0)31 650 3085
- |> Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University
- |> 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK DoD #205
-
- Some things we do today could not be done before. Maybe we can see
- a pattern that the universe has dictated.
-
- Henry Choy
- choy@cs.usask.ca
-