Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site eosp1.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!vax135!houxz!houxm!mhuxl!ulysses!allegra!princeton!eosp1!robison From: robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) Newsgroups: net.ai Subject: Re: Mind and Brain Message-ID: <954@eosp1.UUCP> Date: Wed, 20-Jun-84 12:20:43 EDT Article-I.D.: eosp1.954 Posted: Wed Jun 20 12:20:43 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 21-Jun-84 07:41:11 EDT Organization: Exxon Office Systems, Princeton, NJ Lines: 55 References: I'm not comfortable with Rich Rosen's assertion that intuition is just the mind's unconscious LOGICAL reasoning that happens too fast for the conscious to track. If intuition is simply ordinary logical reasoning, we should be just as able to simulate it as we can other tyes of reasoning. In fact, attempts to simulate intuition account for some rather noteworthy successes and failures, and seem to require a number of discoveries before we can make much real progress. E.g.: I think it is fair to claim that chess players use intuition to evaluate chess positions. We acknowledge that computers have failed to be intuitive in playing chess in at least two ways that are easy for people: - knowing what kinds of tactical shots to look for in a position - knowing how to plan longterm strategy in a position In backgammon, Hans Berliner has a very successful program that seems to have overcome the comparable backgammon problem. His program has a way of deciding, in a smooth, continuous fashion, when to shift from one set of assumptions to another while analyzing. I am not aware of whether other people have been able to develop his techniques to other kinds of analysis, or whether this is one flash of success. Berliner has not been comparably successful applying this idea to a chess program. (The backgammon program defeated thew world champion in a short match, in which the doubling cube was used.) Artists and composers use intuition as part of the process of creating art. It is likely that one of the benefits they gain from intuition is that a good work of art has many more internal relationships among its parts than the creator could have planned. It is hard to see how this result can be derived from "logical" reasoning of any ordinary deductive or inductive kind. It is easier to see how artists obtain this result by making various kinds of intuitive decisions to limit their scope of free choice in the creative process. Computer-generated art has come closest to emulating this process by using f-numbers rather than random numbers to generate artistic decisions. It is unlikely that the artist's intuition is working as "simply" as deriving decision from f-numbers. It remains a likely possibility that a type of reasoning that we know little about is involved. We are still pretty bad at programming pattern recognition, which intuitive thinking does spectacularly well. If one wishes to assert that the pattern recognition is done by well-known logical processes, I would like to see some substantiation. - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison princeton!eosp1!robison