From owner-cse575-fa08-list@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU Thu Dec 4 09:03:36 2008 Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 09:03:20 -0500 From: "William J. Rapaport" Subject: 575 & 663: "The Well-Designed Child" To: CSE575-FA08-LIST@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: John McCarthy: "The Well-Designed Child" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I just finished reading an interesting paper that is relevant to both of my courses this semester: 575/Cog Sci, because it has to do with computational theories of cognition, and 663/Knowledge Representation, because it's a sequel to John McCarthy's original work on commonsense reasoning: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ McCarthy, John (2008), "The Well-Designed Child", Artificial Intelligence 172(2008): 2003-2014 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (The paper is online; go to the UB Libraries Electronic Journal Holdings, search for the journal "Artificial Intelligence", and then search for this article. I'd give you the URL, but it's about 5 or 6 lines long! There is also a "DOI" for this article, if you know how to use the DOI service: doi:10.1016/j.artint.2008.10.001) Basically, McCarthy decides to take seriously Turing's suggestion in Turing's 1950 "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper : "Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain. Presumably the child brain is something like a notebook as one buys it from the stationer's. Rather little mechanism, and lots of blank sheets. ... Our hope is that there is so little mechanism in the child brain that something like it can be easily programmed. The amount of work in the education we can assume, as a first approximation, to be much the same as for the human child." However, McCarthy, along with most contemporary cognitive scientists, believes that the child's brain is not a "blank slate", but contains lots of "innate capabilities". The paper I've recommended lists what McCarthy thinks they are, and how to specify a "language of thought" to express them (which bears a close resemblance to first-order logic :-)