Week 2 Homework

Remember: all homework is to be emailed to our grader, Brad Pitcher at brad@cs.uoregon.edu

Brad's preference is to get one email from you with a subject line of "Week 2 homework" and a complete set of attachments for each problem. If you have problems with this, he will take multiple emails, but make sure you identify what you are sending, e.g., "week 2 reading 1", etc.

You can answer all the textbook and debate questions in a single file, e.g., a single Word document. Easiest is to copy and paste the questions below into your text-processing tool, then provide answers below each question. When you are done, save to a file and then send it to Brad as attachment.

Homework Problems From Chinese Room

Answer the following 3 questions from what you saw in class Tuesday:
1. What is Searle trying to show in the CR thought experiment?
2. If you were given the job of destroying the CR argument, i.e., arguing why it does not preclude Strong AI, what would you focus on?
3. Below is a quote from Searle:
   But the computer does a model or a simulation of a process. And a computer simulation of a mind is about like computer simulation of digestion. I don't know why people make this dumb mistake. You see, if we made a perfect computer simulation of digestion, nobody would think, "Well, let's run out and buy a pizza and stuff it in the computer." It's a model, it's a picture of digestion. It shows you the formal structure of how it works, it doesn't actually digest anything! That's what it is with the things that a computer does for anything. A computer model of what it's like to fall in love or read a novel or get drunk doesn't actually fall in love or read a novel or get drunk. It just does a picture or model of that.

   Give me your critique of this argument. Feel free to agree or disagree. There is no right answer.

Homework Problems From Textbook Reading

These questions are taken from chapter 2 of your textbook. The author is rather long-winded in this chapter, IMHO, so I'm going to take questions from specific sections. In other words, you will not need to read the entire chapter to get at the main points. At least, that is my hope.
1. Name a paradigm shift you have seen in your lifetime. This is just a sneaky question to make sure you know what the term means - the author throws it around a lot.

2. RK mentions "Moore's Law" throughout this chapter. What is this law?

3. The discussion on page 51 includes a riff on the evolution of books. What stage would the author say we are in with regard to books (see 7 stages of the life cycle)? Do you believe books, as we know them, will succumb to stage 7?

   As an aside, it seems to me that the author gets quite pedestrian in this discussion of books. His claims from chapter 1 imply to me that information will be downloaded directly to your brain. What's all this talk about fancy tablets? Who needs a physical artifact when your brain has wifi?

4. Read the discussion of the digital divide in conversation on page 94. Then look at the One Laptop Per Child program.

   The question: Your opinion if OLPC validates RK's argument in this conversation?

   The remainder of chapter 2 is argumentation that technology is getting better, and in particular, computational power is growing at an astonishing rate. Instead of reading about this, I am having a couple of professors come in and tell us about it from their perspective. So you can skip the rest of the chapter as long as you pay attention in class :)

Homework Problems From MIT Debate

No debate questions this week.

Homework Problems From Circuit Building

You will need to use the xLogicCircuits tool in the tools folder. Do problem 1 then use it in problem 2.
1. Build a full-adder. A full-adder has three inputs: P, Q, and R. It has two outputs: S and C. The TT is below. Note that R represents "carry in". And that I have left 0 and 1 in table so you can practice translating to logic. P Q R | S C ------------------------------------------ 0 0 0 | 0 0 0 0 1 | 1 0 0 1 0 | 1 0 0 1 1 | 0 1 1 0 0 | 1 0 1 0 1 | 0 1 1 1 0 | 0 1 1 1 1 | 1 1 BIG HINT: you can use an OR gate and two half-adders to build the circuit. You iconified the half-adder in lab, so you can just drag and drop it two times.

   Iconify your full-adder circuit when complete - you will need to use it in next problem.

2. Show how you can use two of your full-adders to build a circuit to compute two-digit base-2 addition. As shown below, we have four inputs which correspond to the two digits in two different numbers. We also have three outputs which correspond to the three digits in the resulting number. a b + c d ----- e f g We have seen that if the inputs a,b,c,d all are 1, then the result has e is 1, f is 1 and g is 0: 1 1 + 1 1 ----- 1 1 0 As another example, 1 0 + 0 1 ----- 0 1 1 HINT: you should need nothing more than your two full-adders for the circuit. What you have to figure out is how to connect them to inputs, outputs and each other. When finished, iconify it as two-digit.

You should have a minimum of two files you will send to Brad as attachments: (1) a text file with your answers to the reading questions and clip questions, and (2) your week2-circuit file that has your circuit iconified with full-adder and two-digit.