The Science of the Artificial ch. 1 Charles Reid 1/5/2005

What This Chapter Is About Tells us what the book should be about – A means for relating natural law and human purpose – Symbol systems (the human version) Provides some context – What is an artifact? – Why do we create them? – How can they be characterized? – How might we study them?

Artifacts An artifact is something that’s man-made – We live in a man-made world Artifacts are not apart from nature – They embody natural law and human purpose Distinction between artificial and synthetic – Engineering is concerned with synthesis Indications of artifacts (pg. 5) – Artifacts are synthesized – Artifacts may imitate appearance but may lack the reality – Artifacts characterized by functions, goals, adaptation – Artifacts are discussed imperatively as well as descriptively

Exploring Artifacts Fulfillment of purpose or adaptation to a goal – Look at the purpose or goal, the character of the artifact, and the environment the artifact operates in Artifact as interface – Inner environment Organization of natural phenomena capable of attaining goals – Outer environment Determines conditions for goal attainment Functional explanation – Based on outer environment and observable behaviors of the artifact

Simulation We use simulations to gain understanding of the imitated system Can a simulation tell us something we didn’t already know? – Based on known assumptions – Computer only does what we tell it to do

How to Study Computers Computers as artifacts – Use a functional explanation based on outer environment and observable behavior Computers as abstract objects – Abstractions for components only need to capture the nature of the components and not all of the implementation details Computers as empirical objects – Most of them have the same basic components and there are enough of them in existence today that they could be studied empirically Computers as thought – Computers are roughly organized in fashion similar to humans – processor, memory, I/O – Could we learn something about human behavior from computers?

Symbol Systems Symbol Systems can create, copy, destroy, modify, and collect symbols. They are goal seeking information processing systems Computers are symbols systems as is the human mind Simon hypothesizes that human symbol systems have sufficient and necessary means for general intelligent work.