From: Michael \(michka\) Kaplan (michka@trigeminal.com)
Date: Mon Oct 28 2002 - 22:12:45 EST
All this talk about the letter "A" reminded me of something from Hofstadter:
"The problem of intelligence, as I see it is to understand the fluid nature
of mental categories, to understand the invariant cores of percepts such as
your mother’s face, to understand the strangely flexible yet strong
boundaries of concepts such as “chair” or the letter “a“ … The central
problem of (artificial intelligence) is the question: What is the letter ‘a’
and ‘i’? ...By making these claims, I am suggesting that, for any program to
handle letterforms with the flexibility that human beings do, it would have
to possess full-scale general intelligence."
-- Douglas R. Hofstadter, from one of his Metamagical Themas articles
The notion that we could ever capture the essence of "A-ness" has already
been discussed at length and dismissed as impossible without an AI
breakthrough. :-)
MichKa
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