Introduction to Computer Science: Survey
Discussion Questions - Unit Four


Please answer all of the questions below and submit them to your instructor when you are finished with unit four. You should have read chapter 7, Computer Crime, of your text and viewed the video The World at Your Fingertips before answering these questions. All written worked should be typed with double-spaced lines. I will not accept answers that are simply copied from the text.

You can get help with definitions at http://www.pcwebopedia.com. Use this site as a resource, not a crutch. Don't simply copy definitions, explain concepts in your own words.


1. Answer question 9 on page 254 of your text.

2. Answer question 13 on page 255 of your text.

3. Answer question 15 on page 255 of your text

4. Answer question 16 on page 254 of your text.

5. Answer question 17 on page 254 of your text.

6. Can you explain the distinction made in the tape between the mind and the brain? Why is this distinction important to artificial intelligence (AI) researchers?

7. After viewing the tape, can you describe what kinds of problems AI researchers are interested in? Be sure to give examples.

8. What do AI researchers mean by the term common sense? What are some of the examples of common sense discussed in the tape?

9. Part of the tape deals with the difficulty AI researchers have in building programs that use and understand natural languages like English. Two problems mentioned were ambiguity and common sense. Can you explain how and why these two problems make language understanding difficult for a computer?

10. Two schools of AI were mentioned in the tape. Symbolic AI views intelligence as a computational system that simulates intelligence. They use the rules of logic and structures like frames and scripts to model intelligence. Connectionist view intelligence as patterns of neural firings in the brain. The build neural networks to model intelligence. Herbert Dreyfus says both schools of AI have problems. Discuss some of the problems Dreyfus mentions in the tape.