At 7:51 PM -0500 5/30/08, Christopher Menzel wrote:
>On May 30, 2008, at 9:59 AM, John F. Sowa wrote:
>> Ed and Len,
>>
>> Before commenting on your comments, I'd like to mention one of Doug
>> Lenat's anecdotes. Whenever he interviews job applicants at Cyc, he
>> asks them to take a short test with a few English sentences to be
>> translated to first-order logic.
>>
>> The person Doug was interviewing happened to be a professor of
>> logic, and Doug apologized for giving him such an elementary
>> exercise. But the professor flunked.
>
>Sorry, I don't buy it. I suspect, if there's any truth to the
>anecdote at all, that "professor of logic" worked its way into the
>story for dramatic effect and that the interviewee was really a
>philosophy PhD who had taught a couple of intro logic classes. Now
>*that* I could believe. (01)
Or, an alternative explanation, the logician
actually knew a good deal more about language and
FOL than Doug does, and the piece of English was
in fact (as most pieces of English are) extremely
tricky to render accurately into logic, perhaps
containing definite descriptions and modalities,
or using such constructions as 'was considered
the reason why', but Doug considered an accurate
translation to be too fussy and pedantic for
Cyc's robust methodology. (02)
Pat
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 home
40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office
Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax
FL 32502 (850)291 0667 cell
http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us
http://www.flickr.com/pathayes/collections (03)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (04)
|