Drew McDermott

"The only difference is that cognitive science is more committed to understanding existing biological cognition, as opposed to all possible cognition, which is what AI studies. So, to cite a well-worn analogy, cognitive science is to AI as ornithology is to aerodynamics."

"I think AI researchers are always trying to make the problems they study a tad more general than an engineer is happy with. They force the problem into an area which is a little less structured, so the solutions are a little less defined, and we always have to use heuristics to solve them."

"You could say that the definition of the problem is part of AI. For example, with the visual tracking work that's going on here at Yale, the problem is to track something. But what's a ``thing? What counts as a ``something?"

"Well, we're not sure. We look at things that people seem to be able to track, and those are the things the human visual system picks out as trackable things, but that's not a very well-defined concept. Nonetheless, we feel that there's a real problem there, and we can show that the solutions are of great benefit in certain cases."

"An engineer might throw his hands up at a problem like that and say ``Bring me something a little bit more defined than that. I'm willing to print bar codes on a thing, so it's clear what it means to track them. In the long run, it's conceivable that there will be no difference between engineering and AI. It's hard to say."