Rationality in Decision Machines Rationality in Decision Machines Michael P. Wellman University of Michigan Position Paper to be presented at the AAAI Fall Symposium on Rational Agency , November 1995.
Comments welcome .
In adopting the common term, the field's pioneers probably meant to highlight the mechanical nature of computation, and perhaps also to emphasize the productive quality of running computer programs. But often we find it helpful to view this product at a higher level, say, as the solution to some well-posed problem. Indeed, every subfield of computer science defines its own abstractions above the level of computing functions. For example, database specialists might prefer to view the input of their machine as a query , the product as data , and the machine's activity as retrieval . Of course we can always reduce this abstract database machine to the more concrete computing machine, but in doing so we may increase the description complexity and make it more difficult to analyze, predict, or design the behavior of database machines.