Introduction:What Landmarks Are, and Why They Are Important - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 19

1.2.4 Metaphorical Landmarks

It appears that landmarks are serving so well in structuring the spatial domain
that the concept has been mapped into other domains successfully. One of these
mappings happens when geographic reality—the physical world—is mapped to
the metaphysical world. Then for example heaven , paradise or cloud-cuckoo
land become landmarks—orientation points, places to be—which fulfil above's
definition with the only exception that the space can no longer be experienced with
human senses. Hence we do not consider landmarks in metaphysical space.
These mappings into other domains have been mentioned already. Merriam
Webster's definition (Meaning 3) contained “very important events or achieve-
ments”, which would be in the social domain and also in the temporal domain, with
regard to providing structure in time. The landmark victory , a significant event in
history, structures the memory of human experience both as a sudden shift of power
relations, and with it into a before and after the victory.

1.3 Why Landmarks Challenge Intelligent Systems

The interaction between humans—their embodied experience, spatial cognition and
spatial communication—and intelligent systems is the actual focus of this topic.
In this context landmarks are an object of interest because they support human
decision making as intelligent systems should do. And yet, intelligent systems find
special challenges in recognizing, contextualizing, and communicating landmarks.
Let us have a look what these challenges are.
For that purpose let us first clarify what an intelligent system is, especially for the
confusing notion of intelligence in its name. Given that a human is called intelligent
we would like to see some of people's abilities in a machine that promise to support
the human in decision making.
When Alan Turing wanted to decide the question: “Can machines think?” [ 46 ] , he
envisioned a machine that by its communication skills cannot be distinguished from
a person. He suggested an imitation game that has become known as the Turing Test:
If a human player cannot distinguish in a blind dialog whether the communication
partner is human or machine then this partner has to be called intelligent. Turing's
test has fascinated the field of artificial intelligence for so long because it argues
by communication behavior, and does not require from the machine to understand
and duplicate the ways humans sense and represent the world, or reason about the
world. Sensing, representing and reasoning of a machine has made great progress
since Turing's landmark paper, but is of course different from human ways. For
example, robots are able to explore their environment, to learn about it, to form
maps about it, and to orient themselves in this environment by landmarks. Yet each
of these processes works internally quite different from the processes in the mind
of a person. The robot sensors are different from human senses, the landmarks a