Clifford the Red Big Dog

[Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu>]

My apologies to the student  to whom I suggested in jest that he should be 
in the zoo; it is an infelicitous
word choice--probably should have said museum.

All I was getting at was using a wet paper to infer that it must have 
rained *and*  the sprinklers were on is a fairly unusual.
It is clearly lower probability inference than one that infers either rain 
alone or sprinklers alone.

[Then again, it is slippery to slope to decide what is the "standard" 
plausible behavior. Once, after I
saw a particularly nifty program called "Human Language"--where they point 
out some of the unsaid and unwritten but
universally understood rules of languages, I asked my then 4-year old son, 
whether it should be "Big Red Ball" or "Red Big Ball"--and he
promptly said  "Red Big Ball" :-( ]

Rao

ps: I think I was influenced by the attached farside cartoon--which I was 
looking at this morning--in mixing up my zoos and museums..

-------
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature,
and it remains premature today.
     --Isac Asimov

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