Interpreting the results

What the above discussion indicates is that ISAAC is a capable reader of these three stories. How does this fact contribute to an understanding of what ISAAC's abilities are? Two pieces of information are necessary for the interpretation to occur:    

1.

The performance data

2.

Access to the internal state of ISAAC before and after reading

I have already established the level of   ISAAC's performance. I can add other knowledge to this--ISAAC does not possess the concepts needed to comprehend the stories prior to reading them. In particular:

• In Men Are Different, the system knows about industrial robots. No information is provided about intelligent robots, making it impossible to comprehend the story as the narrator cannot be explained.
• For Zoo, ISAAC knows the ``standard'' view of zoos; this enables the first part of the story to be comprehended but not the last.
• In Lycanthrope, no information is given to the system concerning were-cars; without this, the understanding of the ending of the story cannot occur which means the tale cannot be comprehended.

It is possible to view these two pieces of information and arrive at the following conclusion: Since the ISAAC system is a capable reader and since the system did not possess the concepts which would allow a successful comprehension to be achieved, some aspect of the system must of enabled those concepts to be created. This aspect is the   creative understanding process. In addition, an examination of ISAAC's memory after reading reveals that the ``proper'' concepts do exist in memory, while there are not random concepts created. Therefore, it can be concluded that ISAAC's creative understanding process has allowed it to read the stories, stories which it would otherwise be unable to comprehend.