Re: computer-go: Pattern matching

[Elmer Elevator <bobmer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Okay, first I was thinking of writing literature -- plays that deeply touch many
people, like Shakespeare's or Durrenmatt's -- or plays that make peoples'
intellects and senses of humor tingle, like Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi" or the
plays of Joe Orton.

I wondered what the objections to that would be. "That's not knowledge." But of
course it is -- all great authors serve a lengthy apprenticeship, acquiring a
great deal of relevant knowledge. (Shakespeare was an actor in other peoples'
plays; he saw which plays drew big audiences and which turned audiences off, and
tried to figure out why.) "That's subjective -- I don't like Durrenmatt's plays
at all."

Well ... let me know what the other objections are. I don't think they'll be
proper objections; I think they'll just be loopholes to weasel out of the
original broad premise of the question. But I don't think there's going to be a
Deep Blue of playwrighting in our lifetimes or ever.

There are, of course, machines that generate music that people actually pay
money for and dance to -- Tekno -- but I would rather ask about the Knowledge
that Mozart and Bach and Chopin or Charles Ives used to write their music. Is
anyone going to teach this to a machine, and are we going to get original  piano
sonatas of equivalent beauty and emotional involvement anytime soon?

But here's a good example of machine-resistant Knowledge. Reporters on daily
newspapers often have to find someone very quickly -- say, within four hours
before deadline. The person is not very clearly identified like "Jane Smith,"
but rather something like "the ex-wife" or "one of the ex-wives" (but not just
any of the ex-wives -- the one who had his red-headed son) of Richard Jones. Or
"someone who rides a motorcycle who worked in a real estate office with Laurie
Johnson in 1997." Or "a past assault victim of a man who was just arrested for
another assault." Or "There's a guy in this county who's been struck by
lightning three times" (but you can't find an old article about him in the
newspaper morgue; the dumb librarian probably filed the old articles under his
name rather than under "lightning").

I won't make the computer actually get into a car and drive around the city;
we'll restrict the hunt to the office and telephone (a very realistic frequent
restriction).

It's certainly quantifiable and verifiable because either you find this person
in time to interview him/her for your story (win) or you don't (lose). And to be
fair, we won't base it on just one competitive deadline search, but rather on a
year's worth of deadline searches. Like backgammon, there's an element of luck,
so no expert wins every time (but backgammon is a solved computer knowledge
problem).

All I can tell you about this kind of knowledge is that you get better at it
year after year, that it's a skill reporters get very good at and take great
pride in. (Police cheat -- they can use intimidation and threaten to arrest
people to get answers.) Maybe we're arrogant, but if you posted this question to
a bunch of reporters and claimed a computer could learn to do it as well (same
percentage of success) as a seasoned reporter, you'd get laughed at very
vigorously.

Bob Merkin

> Patricia Hughes and David Elsdon wrote:
> >
> > Give me an example of knowledge that cannot be represented on a > machine.
>
> In a course on expert-systems I was told, and I now believe it,
> that "common sence" is very very very very very very hard to represent
> and maybe even impossible.
> But that is because you don't know what you know so maybe I am
> cheating when I use common sence as an example.
>
> Greetz, Pieter