The Emotion Machine

Computer, Speech and Language, 10, 1996, also at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/roni/WWW/me-csl-revised.ps. In these studies, the term ‘bit’ of information is meant in the technical sense of C.E. Shannon in http://cm.bell- labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html.

101

My impression that this also applies to the results reported by R.N. Haber in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2, 583-629,1979.

102

A. M. Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, at www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~dylan/Turing.html

103

See several essays about self-organizing learning systems at: Gary Drescher, Made-Up Minds, MIT Press 1991, ISBN: 0262041200; Lenat’s 1983 “AM” system at http://web.media.mit.edu/~haase/thesis/node52.h tml; Kenneth Haase’s thesis at http://web.media.mit.edu/~haase/thesis/; Pivar, M. and Finkelstein, M. (1964) in The Programming Language LISP, MIT Press 1966; Solomonoff, R. J. “A formal theory of inductive inference,” Information and Control, 7 (1964), pp.1- 22; Solomonoff, R. J. “An Inductive Inference Machine,” IRE Convention Record, Section on Information Theory, Part 2, pp. 56-62, 1957. Also, see his essay at http://world.std.com/~rjs/barc97.html. In recent years this has led to a field of research with the name of ‘Genetic Programming.’

104

Technically, if a system has already been optimized, then any change is likely to make it worse until one find a higher peak, some distance away in the “fitness space.”

105

See §2.6 of Frames, §27.1 of SoM, and Charniak, E. C., Toward a Model of Children’s Story Comprehension. ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AITR- 266.pdf

106

There has been some recent progress toward extracting such kinds of knowledge from large number of users of the Web. See Push Singh’s ‘OpenMind Commonsense’ project at http://commonsense.media.mit.edu/.

107

John McCarthy, “Programs with Common Sense,” in Proc. Symposium on Mechanization of Thought Processes, 1959. Reprinted in Semantic Information Processing, p404.

108

People sometimes use ‘abstract’ to mean ‘complex’ or ‘highly intellectual’—but here I mean almost the opposite: a more abstract description ignores more details—which makes it more useful because it depends less on the features of particular instances.

109

See Elizabeth Johnston’s notes on “Infantile Amnesia” at http://pages.slc.edu/~ebj/IM_97/Lecture6/L6.html

110

In each cycle of operation, the program finds some differences between the current state and the desired one. Then it uses a separate method to guess which of those differences is most significant, and makes a new subgoal to reduce that difference. If this results in a smaller difference, the process goes on; otherwise it works on some other difference. For more details of how this worked, see Newell, A., J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon, “Report on a general problem solving program,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Processing. UNESCO, Paris, pp. 256-64. A more accessible description is in Newell, A., and Simon, H. A., “GPS, a program that simulates human thought,” Computers and Thought, E. A. Feigenbaum and J. Feldman (Eds.), McGraw-Hill, New York, 1963.