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.)