From: larix_occidentalis@yahoo.com   
      
   Don Geddis  wrote, in part:   
      
   > There seem to remain two problems:   
   > 1. If you're trying to solve a reasoning problem, the inference procedures   
   >    work in principle, but in practice they (often) aren't effective enough.   
   > 2. If you're trying to solve an "ordinary programming" problem, it takes more   
   >    effort describe the algorithm (in sufficient detail to get a work   
   solution)   
   >    than it would be to just write it down in an "ordinary programming   
   >    language".   
      
   Hmm. Can we solve (2) (at least in part) by merging procedural and   
   declarative languages? I'm thinking about something like C and SQL for   
   database apps -- there's a specialized language for dealing with the   
   object of interest and there's a general purpose language for getting   
   stuff read in & written out, etc.   
      
   About (1), I think the most serious stumbling block is not so much   
   the lack of power of existing languages for reasoning, but the   
   difficulty in phrasing or rephrasing what is known in formal terms   
   (i.e., in terms of the language). Humans are very adept at rewriting   
   the rules, in effect -- faced with a new situation, people will not   
   only apply what they already know, but they will also invent new   
   facts and rules out of whole cloth. Whether this model-building   
   exercise uses the same reasoning mode as "ordinary" reasoning, or   
   whether it's a significantly different meta-reasoning mode, seems   
   grounds for debate.   
      
   FWIW -- my background is in decision theoretic models. These seem   
   to have sufficient expressive power for lots of real world problems,   
   but the model-rebuilding problem, and computational issues (arbitrarily   
   complex calculations), limit their usefulness.   
      
   > [...] It's a lot like AI in general: you can see HAL in the movie 2001,   
   > and want to use that thing, but nobody knows how to make it.   
      
   I dunno -- "I cannot allow you to do that, Dave" -- is that what we want? 8^)   
      
   L.O.   
      
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