Re: newby asks: is complexity enough for AI?
H. M. Hubey (hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu)
8 Sep 1996 17:20:26 -0400
Peter Lupton <lupton@luptonpj.demon.co.uk> writes:
>However, one might argue that, in certain sorts of situations (and natural
>selection might be one of them), the mere fact that the system becomes more
>complex might, in some sense, force intelligence to occur. Not 'forcing' in the
Actually many of the arguments against evolution not having
a direction are overdone. The reason is that these people
can't think of any other way of arguing against those who
use statistical/mathematical methods for racism instead of
against.
There is plenty of evidence that the direction of evolution
is in the direction of increasing intelligence. I can't
recall the author now, (it might be Jerison) who's collected
info on brain size from lots of different phyla/species, and
the data shows the same thing for mammals, reptiles, etc.
That the earliest ones had small brain size and small variation.
Now the variation is large, and the mean brain size has increased
for all of them. One of the reasons the variation is large is that
the earliest species have not yet gone extinct, but despite that
the mean brain size has increased.
In addition to this we know very well that if we did compute
some kind of a moving average we'd see the same increase since
even animals with brains don't show up until late and homo
sapiens shows up even later.
Plots of distributions of brain case size was in a book on the
brain by Scientific American. There might be someone who has
more info on the book.
--
Regards, Mark
http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu
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