Josh, Your point about layering makes perfect sense.
I just ordered your book, but, impatient as I am, could I ask a question about this, though I've asked a similar question before: Why have not the elite of intelligent and open-minded leading AI researchers not attempted a multi-layered approach? Joshua 2007/6/10, J Storrs Hall, PhD <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Here's a big one: Levels of abstraction. I assume many of you are using a GUI mail client to read this. You're interacting with it in terms of windows, panels, boxes, buttons, menus, dragging and dropping. The GUI was written in terms of a toolkit that implements those concepts on top of an ontology involving events, queues, processes, locks, mutexes, and so forth. The program using the toolkit uses other libraries that are about rfc822-format messages, mime extensions, POP mailboxes, and the like. Typically, the programs and many of the libraries are written in programming languages which offer a model providing concepts like objects, methods, and functions. These in turn are based on lower-level languages where records, pointers, and memory allocation are the order of the day. In order to write code in any of this you have to understand, at least implicitly, the syntax of the language and use the translator that reads your code and compiles it into some internal form, using (most likely) an automatically generated shift-reduce parser. At some stage further down, the result will be assembly language for the machine you're running on, and then binary machine language. (And note that I somehow managed to leave out the entire level of the OS and hardware drivers and interrupt-level programming). There's just a big a stack of abstractions standing between the machine language and the transistors, in the machine architecture. Most AI (including a lot of what gets talked about here) is the equivalent of trying to implement the mail-reader directly in machine code (or transistors, for connectionists). Why people can't get the notion that the brain is going to be at least as ontologically deep as a desktop GUI is beyond me, but it's pretty much universal. Josh
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