Abby Spurdle: In my opinion the advantage of computers is not Artificial Intelligence, but rather Artificial Patience (most AI that I have seen is really doing a bunch of what I would consider to be boring, really fast so people don't have to). Leave the Intelligence to the people.
Abby's response contains a complaint that is often directed at technical advances. So what if we can devise a way to perform some boring task rapidly? I answer that it allows us to delegate the boring task to the machine and proceed with the integration of the results. We run the risk of Douglas Adams' delightful result that we cannot understand, but nearly all of the "big" scientific endeavors stand upon the shoulders of machines doing boring tasks whose duration at human speed would see us all out. My idea of AI is a sort of teamwork between the error-prone synthesis of man and the precise analysis of machine, not a struggle for dominance of one or the other. Jim ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.