All of infty's Comments + Replies

infty100

Sorry, newbie here. I assume that once you've fleshed our your similarity cluster, your initial clue may also be happily proven false, right?

I'm thinking of, say, amputees, or, ahem, furries, neither of which would match your clue, but both of which can be recognised (perhaps with some difficulty in the latter case) as humans, once you've gathered enough information to fill out your cluster.

0taryneast
Also a newbie... but I'd gather that each of the "sign-post" characteristics strongly increase the probability that the subject is a human. So, if you look for "things that are bipedal and featherless" - you have a strong likelihood of finding a human... ie it doesn't necessarily mean that if a thing doesn't have that characteristic, that it isn't human ie A->Human doesn't mean that ~A->~Human though if you find ~A then Human has lowered probability. I reckon you can probably sum across the cluster and as long as it has a good percentage of the signalling characteristics - you'd have a high chance of Human. As to furries and plucked chickens. I'd assume that a temporary-characteristic shouldn't be taken as a permanent characteristic. eg a plucked chicken is temporarily un-feathered (and not by its own choice either!). Normally (for that chicken) it is feathered... the opposite is the case for furries ;)