My program produced the rest. Numbers 10 to 12 were chosen to
show that there were occasional bursts of total lucidity; numbers 7 to 9 are
more typical of the output, floating in that curious and provocative nether-
world between meaning and no-meaning; and then numbers 4 to 6 pretty
much transcend meaning. In a generous mood, one could say that they
stand on their own as pure "language objects", something like pieces of
abstract sculpture carved out of words instead of stone; alternatively, one
could say that they are pure pseudointellectual drivel.
My choice of vocabulary was still aimed at producing humorous ef-
fects. The flavor of the output is hard to characterize. Although much of it
"makes sense", at least on a single-sentence level, one definitely gets the
feeling that the output is coming from a source with no understanding of
what it is saying and no reason to say it. In particular, one senses an utter
lack of visual imagery behind the words. When I saw such sentences come
pouring out of the line printer, I experienced complex emotions. I was very
amused by the silliness of the output. I was also very proud of my achieve-
ment and tried to describe it to friends as similar to giving rules for
building up meaningful stories in Arabic out of single strokes of the
pen-an exaggeration, but it pleased me to think of it that way. And lastly I
was deeply thrilled by the knowledge that this enormously complicated
machine was shunting around long trains of symbols inside it according to
rules, and that these long trains of symbols were something like thoughts in
my own head ... something like them.
Images of What Thought Is
Of course I didn't fool myself into thinking that there was a conscious being
behind those sentences-far from it. Of all people, I was the most aware of
the reasons that this program was terribly remote from real thought.
Tesler's Theorem is quite apt here: as soon as this level of language-
handling ability had been mechanized, it was clear that it did not constitute
intelligence. But this strong experience left me with an image: a glimmer-
ing sense that real thought was composed of much longer, much more
complicated trains of symbols in the brain-many trains moving simultane-
ously down many parallel and crisscrossing tracks, their cars being pushed
and pulled, attached and detached, switched from track to track by a
myriad neural shunting-engines ...
It was an intangible image which I cannot convey in words, and it was
only an image. But images and intuitions and motivations lie mingled close
in the mind, and my utter fascination with this image was a constant spur to
think more deeply about what thought really could be. I have tried in other
parts of this book to communicate some of the daughter images of this
original image-particularly in the Prelude, Ant Fugue.
What stands out in my mind now, as I look back at this program from
the perspective of a dozen years, is how there is no sense of imagery behind
what is being said. The program had no idea what a serf is, what a person is,
or what anything at all is. The words were empty formal symbols, as emptyArtificial Intelligence: Retrospects 623