Re: mind and body

Alexei Sharov (sharov@VT.EDU)
Tue, 2 Jun 1998 17:04:52 -0400


Reply to Cliff:

>Classically, the two camps of AI are (A) those wishing to make
>machines which do smart things, and (B) those wishing to make machines
>which are smart like people are smart.

My impression is that in the long term, problem (A) cannot be
solved without (at least partial) solution of problem (B).
Computers will be smart if they understand something beyond
commands that they are executing. Creating human emulators
physically is rather expensive now and apparently is not very
productive. But it is easier to develop human emulators in
a virtual world. Then they can be taught to recognize objects
and to behave in this world. Eventually they may learn to read
and understand human texts.

I believe that the task of computarization of human thesaurus
is even more important than sequencing human genome. Does
anybody work in this direction?

-Alexei
-------------------------------------------------
Alexei Sharov Research Scientist
Dept. of Entomology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061
Tel. (540) 231-7316; FAX (540) 231-9131; e-mail sharov@vt.edu
Home page: http://www.gypsymoth.ento.vt.edu/~sharov/alexei.html