Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!klaatu.rutgers.edu!josh From: josh@klaatu.rutgers.edu (J Storrs Hall) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: <7749@klaatu.rutgers.edu> Message-ID:Date: 1 Dec 88 02:04:16 GMT References: <7749@klaatu.rutgers.edu> <193600002@trsvax> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 40 > Intelligence is the capacity to do actions, make statements, > exercise judgement, believe knowledge, and pay attention. >--JoSH Let's see now, my computer can do actions (such as print a file), make statements (it tells me when some command is illegal), exercise judgment (isn't that what a conditional jump means?), believe knowledge (I've got several files of "knowledge" on my hard disk), and pay attention (it waits at the command line for an infinite amount of time until I'm ready to tell it something). I've never thought of my MS-DOS machine as intelligent until now :-) I think your definition is not a good working definition for intelligence, at least not in the AI domain. Don Subt I claim that when you say your pc is making statements or believing knowledge you are using metaphor rather than actually using the words in the basic senses I (and Webster) meant them. I had a reason to say "make statements" rather than "display character strings" and "believe knowledge" rather than "store information". If you hear that a person paid attention to X, and, believing Y, exercised his judgement and stated Z, you understand a considerably more complex relationship between those activities than happens in MS-DOS (or even in unix :^). However, it is interesting to reflect on the readiness with which you (in common with most people) anthropomorphize the simple actions which your pc does perform. This leads me to believe that when computers/programs are capable of such activities even in very rudimentary form, people will be quite willing to call them intelligent. In fact, I'd be more than ready to call my computer intelligent if it understood the single word "No!" --JoSH