Abstract

Much research in AI (and cognitive science, more broadly) proceeds on the assumption that there is a difference between being well-informed and being smart. Being well-informed has to do, roughly, with the content of one’s representations--with their truth and the range of subjects they cover. Being smart, on the other hand, has to do with one’s ability to process these representations and with packaging them in a form that allows them to be processed efficiently. The main theoretical concern of artificial intelligence research is to solve "process-and-form" problems: problems with finding processes and representational formats that enable us to understand how a computer could be smart