Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!violet.waterloo.edu!cpshelley
From: cpshelley@violet.waterloo.edu (cameron shelley)
Subject: Re: MORE THOUGHTS ON THE TURING TEST AND NATURAL LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <1991Jun3.135517.17497@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Sender: news@watdragon.waterloo.edu (News Owner)
Organization: University of Waterloo
References: <9105300027.AA15172@lilac.berkeley.edu> <1991Jun3.003423.3594@cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1991 13:55:17 GMT
Lines: 37

In article <1991Jun3.003423.3594@cs.mcgill.ca> eagle@cs.mcgill.ca (Anatol ORLOVSKY) writes:
>In article <9105300027.AA15172@lilac.berkeley.edu> ISSSSM@NUSVM.BITNET (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
>>In article <1991May29.130917.26459@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
>>cpshelley@violet.waterloo.edu (cameron shelley) writes:
>>>
>>>The other thing that comes to mind is a recent remark I heard from
>>>Richard Smolensky at a conference: that he is pursuing the view that
>>>the relationship between competence and performance is one of
>>>reconciling and optimizing the interaction among several, possibly
>>>conflicting preferences.  In other words (and I hope he would find my
>>>paraphrase apt), individual competence contains quite a number of
>>>directives which may either act in concert or conflict (or not
>>>interact at all) depending on circumstances.
>
>This suggests a level of meta-competence, i.e. knowledge about the
>optimal exploitation of given competence to produce desired performance.
>Will meta-competence then need to be controlled by a further competence
>level, and if so, would control overhead decrease (monotonically?) at
>successively higher levels of the meta-competence chain?

It does if one assumes that such control must always be enforced by a
heirarchy of mechanisms.  The model that Paul Smolensky is more likely
to follow (being in connectionism and everything) is that the negotiating
process is intrinsic to the way the preference directives operate.  I
propose a similar view in the paper I mentioned before, except that it
is still framed in a rule-based system.

A consequence of such an approach (using context-sensitivity for control
if you like) is that the design of the system becomes hard to anticipate.
However, a simple and unique control system might suffice: let the
potential solutions compete for a maximal evaluation, eg. the first
viable solution wins.  This is the sort of thing one would expect to
mediate between static competence preferences and the necessity for
real-time performance.

				Cam

