From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Tue Oct 25 2005 - 14:22:35 MDT
At 02:26 PM 25/10/05 -0400, Richard Loosemore wrote:
snip
>>And here was me thinking intelligence was based on an indivisible,
>>ineffable soul :)
>>Seriously, this is the sort of thing I mean. Everyone agrees that of
>>course cognitive systems must consist of a large number of elements -
I don't know if you get complete agreement, but it certainly is true for
the natural examples (brains).
>>what else could they be? (At least everyone on SL4; I doubt anyone who
>>believes in the ineffability of the soul will have bothered to read this far.)
>>Presumably you mean something more than just that, of course, but this is
>>where we need details.
>> Elements are simple computational
>> structures, we will suppose. They may have a bit of machinery inside
>> them (i.e. they are not passive data structures, they are active
>> entities), and they have connections to other elements (a variety of
>> different kinds of connections, including transient and long-term). For
>> the most part, all elements have the same kind of structure and code
>> inside them, but different data (so, to a first approximation, an
>> element is not an arbitrary piece of code, like an Actor, but more like
>> an elaborate form of connectionist "unit").
>>
>>Okay. Connectionism typically uses a few simple equations with large
>>vectors of floating point coefficients, plus an optimized hill climbing
>>algorithm to tweak the coefficients for a training data set. What do you
>>propose to use instead?
>> The most important aspect of an element's life is its history. When it
>> first comes into being, its purpose is to capture a particular
>> regularity (the co-occurence of some other elements, perhaps), and from
>> then on it refines itself so as to capture more precisely the pattern
>> that it has made its own. So, when I first encounter a dog, I might
>> build an element that represents "frisky thing with tail that barks and
>> tries to jump on me", and then as my experience progresses, this concept
>> (aka element) gets refined in all the obvious ways and becomes
>> sophisticated enough for me to have a full blown taxonomy of all the
>> different types of dogs.
>>
>>How? Forget the me-vs-them business, this is what it comes down to: _how_
>>exactly would your proposed architecture accomplish the above?
>>- Russell
When in doubt, look in the back of the book at the answers.
Brain look like they do this at two levels, cells and cortical
columns. The second level might be just to make up for the unreliable
nature of single nerve cells. So, what does one of these columns do? How
does it talk to others? And how does it learn? Can any of this be mapped
into hardware/software? Are these even the right questions?
Keith Henson
Keith Henson
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