What sort of a thing is an AI experiment?
Karen Spärck Jones · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1990
Prolegomenon My concern is with what an AI experiment is, and hence with what AI is. I shall talk about what experiments are actually like, but suggest that this is what they must be like. Thus is it reasonable to suppose that AI experiments are, or could be, like the experiments of classical physics? I do not believe it is. This is not because we cannot expect the result of a single critical experiment to validate a theory, as we cannot expect a single translation to validate a translation program, for example: we can presumably extend the classical model to cover the case where validation depends on a set of results, for different data. Nor is it because we have not in practice got anything like an adequate predictive theory. I believe that we cannot in principle have the sort of predictive theory associated with physics, because we are not modelling nature in the classical physics sense. I shall elaborate on what I think we are doing, but claim now that we reach the same conclusion if we consider the suggestion that we are not in the classical physics position, but rather in that of investigative biologists, doing experiments to find out what nature is like (notionally without any theory at all, though perhaps in fact influenced by some half-baked theory). This is because there is nothing natural to discover.