able in any way at all (which I believe it is), it is capturable in an A TN-
grammar. True. But in that case, I maintain, the grammar will be defining
not just musical structures, but the entire structures of the mind of a
beholder. The "grammar" will be a full grammar of thought-not just a
grammar of music.
Winograd's Program SHRDLUWhat kind of program would it take to make human beings admit that it
had some "understanding", even if begrudgingly? What would it take
before you wouldn't feel intuitively that there is "nothing there"?
In the years 1968-70, Terry Winograd (alias Dr. Tony Earrwig) was a
doctoral student at MIT, working on the joint problems of language and
understanding. At that time at MIT, much AI research involved the so-
called blocks world-a relatively simple domain in which problems concern-
ing both vision and language-handling by computer could fit easily. The
blocks world consists of a table with various kinds of toy-like blocks on
it-square ones, oblong ones, triangular ones, etc., in various colors. (For a
"blocks world" of another kind, see Figure 117: the painting Mental Arithme-
tic by Magritte. I find its title singularly appropriate in this context.) The
vision problems in the MIT blocks world are very tricky: how can a com-
puter figure out, from a TV -scan of a scene with many blocks in it,just what
kinds of blocks are present, and what their relationships are? Some blocks
may be perched on top of others, some may be in front of others, there may
be shadows, and so on.
FIGURE 117. Mental Arithmetic, by Rene Magritte (1931).Artificial Intelligence: Retrospects^627