Feature request: Path append operators for strings

[Tommi]

On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 10:48:05 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> For me, the most interesting question in all of this is "What 
> is intelligence?". While that might seem the preserve of 
> philosophers, I believe that computers have the ability to (and 
> already do) demonstrate new and diverse types of intelligence, 
> entirely unlike human intelligence but nonetheless highly 
> effective.

A quite fitting quote from "How to Create a Mind", I think:

"American philosopher John Searle (born in 1932) argued recently 
that Watson is not capable of thinking. Citing his “Chinese room” 
thought experiment (which I will discuss further inchapter 11), 
he states that Watson is only manipulating symbols and does not 
understand the meaning of those symbols.

Actually, Searle is not describing Watson accurately, since its 
understanding of language is based on hierarchical statistical 
processes—not the manipulation of symbols. The only way that 
Searle’s characterization would be accurate is if we considered 
every step in Watson’s self-organizing processes to be “the 
manipulation of symbols.” But if that were the case, then the 
human brain would not be judged capable of thinking either.
It is amusing and ironic when observers criticize Watson for just 
doing statistical analysis of language as opposed to possessing 
the “true” understanding of language that humans have. 
Hierarchical statistical analysis is exactly what the human brain 
is doing when it is resolving multiple hypotheses based on 
statistical
inference (and indeed at every level of the neocortical 
hierarchy). Both Watson and the human brain learn and respond 
based on a similar approach to hierarchical understanding. In 
many respects Watson’s knowledge is far more extensive than a 
human’s; no human can claim to have mastered all of Wikipedia, 
which is only part of Watson’s knowledge base. Conversely, a 
human can today master more conceptual levels than Watson, but 
that is certainly not a permanent gap."