teaching logic

What I was wondering about AI was how advanced their thinking is.  I don't think it's actual thinking, but I'm using the word so that I can compare it to carbon unit thinking.  What I wonder is, when they rewrite their algorithms how is it done?  Is it just a list of don't do this, don't do thats, or more like a general principle, like taking the center of the board in chess.

What I really wonder about is the one Beagles mentioned that won Jeopardy, Watson.  Chess is logical with fairly simple rules, but quiz shows are just stuff you know or you don't know, which would be easy enough for a computer but then it is in English, and English is full of idioms and words that mean different things depending on how they are used.  I can see them getting plenty of data into Watson, but how did they get him to understand English?

Can they program a computer to let its mind wander the way we let ours do?  I suppose you could program it to dip into its memory at random and pick out whatever and see what it can do with it, but the computer's memory is so vast, what are the chances it will come up with something useful?  But then our memories are probably vaster than any computers.

You know that thing where you are just walking down the street thinking about chess and then you are thinking about Alpine valleys and then you are thinking about ice cream machines?  How does that happen?  What I've read is that your subconscious is not like that subterranean cavern with monklike figures walking dim hallways, but it is more like a mob of paparazzi banging on the doors each paparazz wanting to get their foot in the door with their newest idea.,  Could the computer have a subroutine, no a bunch of subroutines, rampaging through the database for interesting stuff and then banging on the door of the cpu unit?  Well hell, I don't know.


I don't think Beagles was talking about proprioception which seems to be more akin to the way when your arms are full of packages and somebody hands you another you find a way to juggle them around without consciously thinking about it.

Does Old Dog think that the Intelligent Designer favored bilateral symmetry?  There used to be a lot of animals with circle symmetry like starfish, but most of them got wiped out by the first big extinction. Maybe if that hadn't happened we would all be intelligent land octopi.


Just when Old Dog suspicions that They are legalizing dope to dope us into submission, that ol' Southern sheriff, Sessions, decides to try to stomp it out.


Beagles brings up an interesting point when he talks about 'gifts.'  It seems like certain genetic makeup would favor things like being a musician or an athlete, likely not a poet or a painter or a politician or a philosopher.

How intrinsic is logic?  It seems so obvious, but then it wasn't until the Greeks that it was put into that if/then, and/or form.  I don't remember it being taught in grade or high school, maybe a passing mention in the history of the Greeks, but i don't remember it being taught even in arithmetic.  Shouldn't we be teaching that in school?

And maybe they should teach the fallacy of the slippery slope and of the so is your mother argument.  Or how about this one?  The conservative reps, championing some hard right candidate, would whine that the reps had been running moderates (McCain, Romney) and losing the elections.  Therefore they (falsely) reasoned they ought to run a hard right guy if they wanted to win.  That's like saying you've been running dogs to catch that possum and haven't caught squat, therefore you ought to round up a posse of cats.  Or, get this, we've been running relatively sane guys and losing maybe we should run a bullgoose looney.  Oh wait, they did, and that worked.