From owner-cse575-fa08-list@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU Thu Aug 28 14:56:56 2008 Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:56:35 -0400 From: "William J. Rapaport" Subject: 575: On the relation of Cognitive to Computer Science To: CSE575-FA08-LIST@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: 575: On the relation of Cognitive to Computer Science ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Amlan Chatterjee writes: > Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:32:14 -0400 > From: ac82@buffalo.edu > > I am a Graduate Student in Computer Science...taking the CSE575 > Introduction to Cognitive Science Course this semester. > > ...I have taken this course out of interest as I would get some exposure > to the other disciplines that are associated with this course as this > is an "inter-disciplinary" subject. Initially I was a bit confused as > to how can one relate philosophy and psychology with computer science > on the platform of cognition. > > But today when you were discussing about the classification of "the > researchers who study cognitive behavior", I suddenly felt that I have > got hold of the main essence of what we are going to study in this > course. I could visualize myself, and most probably many people that I > know, in some point of the classification. > > I feel that all the programs that we write, whether they are related to > Artificial Intelligence or not, are a form of cognition. The better we > are at cognition, the better our programs are. This means the better we > understand the world around us, the better we are able to model those > in a computer system. Based on whatever little I have understood, I > think that this should be a basic course in Computer Science, and also > many other disciplines, which makes people aware of how they function > and make computers imitate the same in the best way possible. There is an interesting question as to what constitutes an AI program: As we'll see later in the course, typically AI programs are ones that try to "simulate" some aspect of human cognition. One kind of program that is **not** typically considered to be an AI program is an operating system (such as Windows, or Mac OS X, or Unix, or Linux, etc.). Yet before the days of personal computers, operating systems were people who operated the computer and made decisions about which programs would be run at what times. So, arguably, an operating system simulates that cognitive task that used to be performed by humans!