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From: jlc@goanna.OZ.AU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Re: Why AI is not a science
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Date: Tue, 7-Jul-87 21:37:17 EDT
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Posted: Tue Jul  7 21:37:17 1987
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Don Norman says that AI is not a Science!
Is Mathematics a science or is it not?
No experiments, no comparisons, thus they are not Sciences!
Perhaps both AI and Maths are Arts, ie. creative disciplines.
Both adhere to their own rigour and methods.
Both talk about hypothetical worlds.
Both are used by researchers from other disciplines as tools,
Maths is used to formally describe natural phenomena,
AI is used to construct computable models of these phenomena.

So, where is the problem?
Hmmm, I think some of the AI researchers wander into the
areas of their incompetence and they impose their quasi-theories
on the specialists from other scientific domains. Some of those
quasi-theories are later reworked and adopted by the same specialists.

Is it, then, good or bad? It seems that lack of scientific constraints
may be helpful in advancing knowledge about the principles of science,
it seems that the greatest breakthroughs in Science come from those
who were regarded as unorthodox in their methods.

May be AI is such unorthodox Science, or perhaps an Art.
Let us keep AI this way!

Jacob L. Cybulski