Christian Graus wrote:

She just shrieks 'cynical' whenever I try to discuss it with her, and tells me all sorts of implausible tales about her mothers visits to clairvoyants. It's being subjected to this drivel that leaves me with strong opinions on the topic.

If you substituted GOD for ghosts, I'd wager much of what has been said in the thread would still apply. The problem withanything that can't be proven in an independantly reproducable format is that you'll always have your believers and non-believers and all believers will call the non-believers cynical. I was in a bible study with my wife once and the gentleman speaking said, "I could speak in tongues and convince everyone here of whatever I want, but that would be abusing the gift that was given to me." I'm sitting there thinking, if you did I might actually believe this pile of hucus pokus your trying to sell. Ghosts are no different, those who "commune" witht eh spirit world when forced to something concrete will say something along the lines of, the spirits won't communicate while a non-believer is present" It's all bunch of bull. I won't say that we're not more than the sum of our parts, that the energy that makes us "alive" dosen't persist after we die, but tell me, if you died would you be sticking around the same old stomping grounds, or would you go places you never could of gone before?

This goes back to the oldest question fo what defines intelligence, is intelligence simply finding the right answer (as this does when provided with every possible question and answer. Or is intelligence the process fo finding the best answer when provided with an incomplete dataset. Fro example an artificial intelligence would be able to take the information collected from expierience (previous games, not every possible game) and examine the best course of action looking ahead a modest number of moves. the decision reached would be an intelligent one, but not definitively the right one. To me thats the difference between artificial intelligence and an expert system. Expert systems always make the right decisions as long as they know the answer. A chess AI would that had practiced ona normal chess board would be able to play equally as well on an abnormal chess board (I've seen some shaped in an infinity symbol, or the trekky fall back of "3-d" chess) the priniciples would be the same for deciding, while an expert system would say "huh?"

Can we say Wargames?

ratamoa wrote:

And when it plays itself? Who wins