13.5 Learning A Script


For a child, the next drawing task involves depicting two or more people. "This involves wonderful problems about how to depict social interactions and relationships -- and these more ambitious projects lead the child away from being concerned with making the pictures of the individual more elaborate and realistic. But drawing learning does not stop.

Minsky now explores the notion of "practice making perfect", which strikes him as being odd -- "You might expect, instead, that the more you learned, the slower you would get -- from having more knowledge from which to choose! How does practice spped things up?"

Minsky proceeds to suggest that what goes on is a special type of learning by bridging, in which links are created from an existing program to a set of new and simpler processes (which he calls a script). The script reflects the essence of the program, provides a more compact notation for it, and presumably allows the program's consequences to be produced by more efficient means. "The people we call `experts' seem to exercise their special skills with scarcely any thought at all -- as though they were simply reading preasembled scripts. Perhaps wehn we `practice' to improve our skills, we're mainly building simpler scripts that don't engage so many agencies."

Q: Is building a script an instance of reformulation? Another q: What is Minsky really talking about when he describes a program or a script? How are these ideas, central to convential AI, to be converted into his SOM perspective? For example, is a society of agents a program?


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