From: pindor@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Drawing the entity/environment boundary
Organization: UTCS Public Access
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 18:34:07 GMT

In article <C0FryG.36q@iat.holonet.net> ken@iat.holonet.net (Ken Easlon) writes:
.......
>
>>You are wrong. There are many programs nowadays which are so complicated
>>that the programmers who wrote them have problems understanding the
>>program's overall behavior in many circumstances. 
>
>I HATE it when people say I'm wrong.
>
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Next time I'll be more considerate.

>Ok, I'll admit that a creation of mind can produce unpredictable results
>i.e. a random number generator.
>
>However, it seems to me that one of a programmer's main jobs is to bring
>the program's unpredictability under control, to get it to do something
>like what he had in mind before he started coding.
>
I am not talking about randomness or undesirable unpredictability. A programmer
specifies rules and perhaps a goal, but in complex circumstances the program 
may find a route which would not occur to the programer. Some time ago
I have read, for example (possibly in Scientific American), about a master
chess program which would make moves totally puzzling to its creators 
(1including a chess master), who were convinced that there must be a bug in 
the program, since the move seemed very stupid to them. After a lenghty
analysis it turned out that the move was the best under circumstances, but so
untypical that even the chess master would not think of it - the program
played better chess than its creators and not because of the speed of the
computer.

>I'll grant there's an interactive process, a compromise between what the
>programmer originally had in mind and what he must settle for.  In fact,
>sometimes there is a serendipitous fortuitous improvement over the original
>expectation.  
>
I do not think my example qualifies under 'a serendipitous fortuitous 
improvement'. For me it is closer to a case of a student applying rules
he/she learned from a teacher in ways which would not occur to the teacher.

>I'll even go so far as to say a program must have a certain amount of
>unpredictability to be thought of as intelligent.  
>
>Nonetheless I maintain that creations of man, the essence of the "A" in AI,
>must yield to the control of it's creator to be considered truly
>artificial.  Should the entity gain autonomy as in Gibson's Wintermute, I
>think it has taken on a quality that makes it something more than
>artificial.
>
Why? If gaining autonomy was a result (maybe unexpected) of rules built in
by the creator, when the AI encountered certain circumstances, how is it
different from the example I gave above?

>>And to give another, but a very telling example: Did John Conway, when he
>>invented the Game of Life, had any idea of the richness of structure his
>>simple rules would lead to? 
>
>I suspect he had some idea, or some hope, certainly some curiosity about
>what the thing might do.  Otherwise why invent it?
>
He certainly had curiosity about what the thing might do. Are you saying that 
every pattern produced by the Game of Life is an extension of John Conway's
ingenuity? He had some goal in mind but his creation is producing results
which he certainly did not imagine. The same may be true of 
a creator of an AI - gaining autonomy would be such an unexpected thing and
even more its autonomous behaviour. Why would it invalidate the letter 'A'?
>
>--
>Ken Easlon                | "...somebody spoke and I went into a dream..."
>ken@holonet.net           |    -Paul McCartney
>Pleasantly Unaffiliated   |
>

Andrzej

-- 
Andrzej Pindor
University of Toronto
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pindor@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy