A standard definition of artificial intelligence is that it is simply the effort to produce on computers forms of behavior that, if they were done by human beings, we would regard as intelligent. But within this definition, there is still a variety of claims and ways of interpreting the results of AI programs. The most common and natural approach to AI research is to ask of any program, what can it do? What are the actual results in terms of output? On this view, what matters about a chess-playing program, for example, is simply how good it is. Can it, for example, beat chess grand masters? But there is also a more theoretically oriented approach in artificial intelligence, which was the basis of the AI contribution to the new discipline of cognitive science. According to this theoretical

For the sake of the discussion, let us assume that AIPA is completely successful and that we will soon have programs whose performance can equal or beat that of any human in any comprehension task at all. Assume we had machines that could not only play better chess but display equal or better comprehension of natural languages, write equal or better novels and poems, and prove equal or better mathematical theorems. In short, let us fantasize any success of AIPA that we care to imagine. What should we make of these results? What would be the implications for AICS of such successes in AIPA?

More recent successes have been achieved by ignoring the thoughts of chess masters and simply using the much-greater computational power of contemporary hardware. This approach, called "brute force," exploits the fact that specially designed computers can calculate hundreds of thousands or even millions of moves, something no human chess player can do (Matthys, 1995). The best current programs can thus beat all but the very best chess players, but it would be a mistake to think of them as contributions to AICS (Ptacek, 1994). They tell us nothing about human cognition, except that an electrical machine working on different principles can defeat human beings in playing chess, as it can defeat human beings in doing arithmetic.

According to this weaker, or more cautious, version of AICS, we can use the computer to do models or simulations of mental processes, as we can use the computer to do simulations of any other process that we can describe precisely enough to enable us to program its simulation on a computer. This other extreme of artificial intelligence I call Weak

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