On 13/04/07, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
To convey this subtlety as simply as I can, I would suggest that you ask yourself how much intelligence is being assumed in the preprocessing system that does the work of (a) picking out patterns to be considered by the system, and (b) picking the particular patterns that are to be rewarded, according to some "success" criterion. Here is the problem: if you are not careful you will assume MORE intelligence in the preprocessor than you were hoping to get the core of the system to learn. There are other issues, but that is one of the main ones.
For the record I agree with this critique of some of the neuroscience views of reinforcement learning in the brain.
What I find tremendously frustrating is the fact that people are still so dismally unaware of these issues that they come out with statement such as the one in the quote: speaking as if the idea of reward assigment was a fantastic idea, and as if the neuroscience discovery of a possible mechanism really meant anything. The neuroscience discovery was bound to collapse: I said that much of it the first time I heard of it, and I am glad that it has now happened so quickly. The depressing part is that the folks who showed it to be wrong think that they can still tinker with the mechanism and salvage something out of it.
It think they do this because they haven't found a better hypothesis and have too much invested in the previous status quo. I'd be curious to know if your hypothesis for a motivation system has the potential for the same simple signal given to systems, with different histories, to cause the system to attempt to get the same signal again (addiction being the pure example of this). This is one of the important phenomenon I require a motivational system to explain. Will Pearson ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
