(Long) Re: Autocoding project proposal.

[Stefaan A Eeckels]

On 07 Feb 2002 08:53:05 -0800
David Masterson <dmaster at synopsys.com> wrote:

> >>>>> Timothy Rue writes:
> 
> > I've identified and defined the tool and it's natural components.
> 
> > The problem is in getting an industry that has been programmed to
> > depend on some level of manual control over what the users can and
> > can't do, to let go of such control and make available such a
> > natural automation tool as identified, so that the user can do
> > things for themselves, rather than being dependant on the
> > programmers and whether or not they have the resources to get a
> > programmer to do what they need done.
> 
> Thus far, I see nothing "natural" in your approach.
> 
> > The problem is perhaps to prevasive for you to see?
> 
> Possibly.  I may have been in the "forest" for so long that all I can
> see are "trees".  On the reverse side, perhaps you've been looking at
> the "forest" for so long that you don't see how each "tree" has an
> impact on it.

IMHO, Timothy's problem is that he overestimates the importance
of the tool. If the computer has to supply the information to
disambiguate the user's instructions, it needs to be provided
with that information.  He's right in his perception that the
tool itself can be rather simple, and concerned mostly with the
dynamic creation of links between bits of information; after all,
that's the way the brain goes about it.

The problem is how to get the human context in the computer. 
So much of what we take for granted depends wholly on us being
humans, with human I/O systems, that trying to simulate it with
a keyboard and a (graphical) screen as frontends to a hierarchical
filing system is all but impossible. Growing up as humans in a
human society is probably the only way to equip a "thinking machine"
with the context to exhibit human intelligence. Surely, the machine's
capability to handle the complexity needs to be present, but our
capability to formalize our own thought processes is so deficient
we cannot hope to feed it into something that is not a human
brain. 

Take care,

-- 
Stefaan (GPG Fingerprint 25D8 551B 4C0F BF73 3283 21F1 5978 D158 7539 76E4)
-- 
"Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which
 could only have originated in California." --Edsger Dijkstra