ABSTRACT
We are listening to the melancholy hero of a grade-B film speaking of his rival, not knowing (as we do) that it was our hero who had already won her heart. In statement, he is not thinking of arithmetic; he is talking about reasoning. He reasons based on what he thinks he knows about his rival's perfidious ways. Reducing logical reasoning to formal rules is an endeavor going back to Aristotle. It was the underlying basis for Leibniz's dream of a universal computational language. In January 1999, the American Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meeting in Anaheim, California under the heading Challenges for a New Century. In 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT, wrote a program called ELIZA that engaged in a dialogue with a user entering English sentences from a keyboard. Watson used the words and phrases making up the clue to search its data base for matches.
