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Unit 14: Knowledge-based Decision Support

“insane.” One merely need note that we often make mistakes; we are not all chess grandmasters Notes
even though we may know all the rules of chess; and unfortunately, not everyone gets an A on
the exam.

!
Caution A human-centered approach must be an empirical science, involving hypothesis
and experimental confirmation.
A rationalist approach involves a combination of mathematics and engineering. People in each
group sometimes cast aspersions on work done in the other groups, but the truth is that each
direction has yielded valuable insights.

Acting Humanly: The Turing Test Approach

The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing, was designed to provide a satisfactory operational
definition of intelligence. Turing defined intelligent behaviour as the ability to achieve human-
level performance in all cognitive tasks, sufficient to fool an interrogator. Roughly speaking,
the test proposed is that the computer should be interrogated by a human via a teletype, and
passes the test if the interrogator cannot tell if there is a computer or a human at the other end.
Programming a computer to pass the test provides plenty to work on. The computer would need
to possess the following capabilities:
Natural language processing to enable it to communicate successfully in English (or some
other human language);
Knowledge representation to store information provided before or during the
interrogation;
Automated reasoning to use the stored information to answer questions and to draw new
conclusions;

Machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate patterns.
Turing’s test deliberately avoided direct physical interaction between the interrogator and the
computer, because physical simulation of a person is unnecessary for intelligence. However, the
so-called total Turing Test includes a video signal so that the interrogator can test the subject’s
perceptual abilities, as well as the opportunity for the interrogator to pass physical objects
“through the hatch.”

Thinking Humanly: The Cognitive Modelling Approach

If we are going to say that a given program thinks like a human, we must have some way of
determining how humans think. We need to get inside the actual workings of human minds.
There are two ways to do this: through introspection (trying to catch our own thoughts as they
go by) and through psychological experiments.
Once we have a sufficiently precise theory of the mind, it becomes possible to express the theory
as a computer program. If the program’s input/output and timing behavior matches human
behavior, that is evidence that some of the program’s mechanisms may also be operating in
humans.

Example: Newell and Simon, who developed GPS, the “General Problem Solver” (Newell
and Simon, 1961), were not content to have their program correctly solve problems. They were
more concerned with comparing the trace of its reasoning steps to traces of human subjects
solving the same problems. This is in contrast to other researchers of the same time (such as

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