CS371 Midterm

Write (type) your answers to the following questions, using sophisticated jargon from the field where appropriate. Have fun with it!

1. Pick one of the following questions:

a. You are having a big dinner party, and Martha Stewart is invited. You want everything to go smoothly, but some of your guests are a bit picky (especially Martha!) You have noticed some of the following rules about your friends:
- Vegetarians don't like to sit across from meat eaters.
- Smokers don't like to have a non-smoker on the side that they hold their fork (handedness).
- The women don't like to have younger men on their left.
- Left-handed people should sit on the end of a side of the table.
You want to sit all of your friends so that all of the constraints are satisfied. How could you solve this problem using tools that we have discussed in class? Give examples of the representations you would use.
How would the problem change if you could break some of the constraints? What if the constraints were weighted as to their importance, with the lower ones being the ones you should break first? Discuss how your original solution would, or would not handle this situation.
b. The computational-representational understanding of mind makes some assumptions about how the mind might work. Explain CRUM, and give some reasons that you believe both support it, and do not support it.

2. Pick one of the following questions:

a. Analogy-making has been argued to lie at the core of human thinking. Compare and contrast two models of making analogies and discuss the big differences between them.
b. Cognitive science has its primary goal of understanding mind. Discuss the idea of how building a model of a behavior (like making analogies) could tell us something about cognition. Discuss how this strategy could work, and how it could fail.

3. Pick one of the following questions:

a. Discuss Pinker's paper "The Rules of Language". What is the evidence for "rules" in language? What evidence is there against these ideas? Discuss the argument for/against "rules" in language and possible experiments that could help answer this question.
b. Discuss Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment from his paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs". What, in your opinion, is the correct response? Give supporting evidence for your interpretation, and against the other responses.