Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!rochester!cornell!uw-beaver!teknowledge-vaxc!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Constructive Question
Message-ID: <1053@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jun 88 06:53:00 GMT
References: <1313@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 35

In article <1313@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>, gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) writes:
> What's the difference between Cognitive Science and AI?  Will the
> recent interdisciplinary shift, typified by the recent PDP work, be
> the end of AI as we knew it?
> 
> What IS in a name?

To answer the second question first, what's in a name is "history".

I do not expect much in the way of agreement with this, but for me
- Cognitive Science is the discipline which attempts to understand
  and (ideally) model actual human individual & small-group behaviour.
  People who work in this area maintain strong links with education,
  psychology, philosophy, and even AI.  Someone who works in this
  area is likely to conduct psychological experiments with ordinary
  human subjects.  It is a science.

- AI is the discipline which attempts to make "intelligent" artefacts,
  such as robots, theorem provers, IKBSs, & so on.  The primary goal
  is to find *any* way of doing things, whether that's the way humans
  do it or not is not particularly interesting.  Machine learning is a
  part of AI:  a particular technique may be interesting even if humans
  *couldn't* use it.  (And logic continues to be interesting even though
  humans normally don't follow it.)  Someone trying to produce an IKBS may
  obtain and study protocols from human experts; in part it is a matter
  of how well the domain is already formalised.
  AI is a creative art, like Mathematics.

- The "neural nets" idea can be paraphrased as "it doesn't matter if you
  don't know how your program works, so long as it's parallel."

If I may offer a constructive question of my own:  how does socialisation
differ from other sorts of learning?  What is so terrible about learning
cultural knowledge from a book?  (Books are, after all, the only contact
we have with the dead.)