Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

10 HOW THE MIND WORKSAnd these problems arise with a nice, crisp letter of the alphabet.Imagine trying to design a recognizer for a shirt, or a face! To be sure,after four decades of research in artificial intelligence, the technology ofshape recognition has improved. You may own software that scans in apage, recognizes the printing, and converts it with reasonable accuracy toa file of bytes. But artificial shape recognizers are still no match for theones in our heads. The artificial ones are designed for pristine, easy-torecognizeworlds and not the squishy, jumbled real world. The funnynumbers at the bottom of checks were carefully drafted to have shapesthat don't overlap and are printed with special equipment that positionsthem exactly so that they can be recognized by templates. When the firstface recognizers are installed in buildings to replace doormen* they willnot even try to interpret the chiaroscuro of your face but will scan in thehard-edged, rigid contours of your iris or your retinal blood vessels. Ourbrains, in contrast, keep a record of the shape of every face we know(and every letter, animal, tool, and so on), and the record is somehowmatched with a retinal image even when the image is distorted! in all theways we have been examining. In Chapter 4 we will explore how thebrain accomplishes this magnificent feat.Let's take a look at another everyday miracle: getting a body frojjfplace toplace. When we want a machine to move, we put it on whee&f The inventionof the wheel is often held up as the proudest accomplishment of civilization.Many textbooks point out that no animal h^sevolved wheels andcite the fact as an example of how evolution is often incapable of findingthe optimal solution to an engineering problem. But it is not a good exampleat all. Even if nature could have evolyecl a moose on wheels, it surelywould have opted not to. Wheels are^good only in a world with toads andrails. They bog down in any terraiivfhat is soft, slippery, steep, or uneven.Legs are better. Wheels have to^'roll along an unbroken supporting ridge,but legs can be placed on a series of separate footholds, an extretne examplebeing a ladder. Legs can also be placed to minimize lurching and tostep over obstacles. Eveji today, when it seems as if the world has becomea parking lot, only about half of the earth's land is accessible to vehicleswith wheels or tracks, but most of die earth's land is accessible to vehicles withfeet: animals, the vehicles designed by natural selection.