On Saturday 12 May 2007 09:18:16 am Mike Tintner wrote: > Josh:My major hobby-horse in this area is that a concept has to be an active > machine, capable of recognition, generation, inference, and prediction. > > This sounds very like Jeff Hawkins, (just reading On Intelligence now). Do > you see your position as generally accepted, or at the forefront of changing > AI attitudes to concepts?
Procedural embedding of knowledge was used, and the phrase introduced, by Winograd in the 1970's. It became passe in the 80s when people tried to pack lots of "knowledge" into the expert systems but essentially traded quality for quantity. BTW, Hawkins has been discussed at length here -- some of his ideas are valuable, but none is particularly original, and in many places where he says things like "nobody has tried or is doing X" he's often speaking from ignorance. > And if it's not too much to ask (and it may be), would you care to give a > particular concept example of what you mean? Consider my concept of a tennis ball. I have circuitry in my brain -- a neural FPGA is closer to the way I think about it than a sequential program is -- to recognize it when I see it, when I feel it, when I hear it bounce, when I put my foot down on it without having seen it. I have similar machinery for throwing it, and for predicting what it's going to do when it's thrown by someone else. Indeed the circuitry is good enough to control a racquet within the seconds of arc angle and milliseconds of time to volley it to a chosen spot when it's hit at me at over 50 FPS -- these circuits are specialized enough that you can tell from an EEG trace whether a tennis pro is playing with natural or synthetic strings in his racquet, so it's pretty clear that they are specific to tennis balls as the projectile. My concept of a tennis ball includes the ability to squeeze one and vary my predictions of its trajectory after a bounce depending on the feel. It includes the motor circuitry to shape the hand to hold 2, 3, or 4 of them (not easy) and to know how many I have in my pocket by the pressure on the leg and the stretch of the pants fabric. Of course it also includes declarative stuff like the facts that they are yellow (but were typically white 30 years ago), round, 2.25" in diameter, and cost about a dollar. Josh ----- 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
