> > Yep. Novamente contains particular mechanisms for converting between > declarative and procedural knowledge... something that is learned > procedurally can become declarative and vice versa. In fact, if all goes > according to plan (a big if of course ;) Novamente should *eventually* be > much better at this than the human brain.
I'm glad that you choose to incorporate elements of human cognitive theory into Novamente, even if you are not intent on building a brain. Such commonalities will make the design of NM far more intuitive and accessible to designer and lay-person alike. > > For instance, humans are not very good at making procedural knowledge > declarative -- it takes a rare human to be able to explain and understand > how they do something they know how to do well. There is a real algorithmic > difficulty here, but even so, I think a lot of the difficulty that humans > have in doing this is "unnecessary", i.e. a consequence of the particular > way the brain is structured rather than a consequence of the (admittedly > large) difficulty of the problem involved. > I disagree that we have a problem converting procedural to declarative for all domains. As an example, I can retrieve a phone number from procedural memory with 1 retrieval operation (watch my fingers dial it). Admittedly this system isn't as slick as one that would work purely internally, it requires performance of the task, but it works. Grammar is tougher, I can test any given rule by using it out in a sentence and seeing how it sounds. But extrapolating all of the rules I use is a tricky problem, in fact it's one we haven't completely finished solving (the rules of English grammar are similar, but not identical to the rules our brains want to use). And then communicating how to swing a golf club is another matter, but I think the limitation there lies in a lack of communication. Our brains have no good way of transmitting or interpreting such fine grained information. And to be fair to our brains, transcribing a motor memory of how to move 10,000 muscles in a very precise sequence into declarative knowledge is an extremely challenging problem. Particularly because that sequence isn't static, but requires feedback from joint sensors. The information isn't just the sequence of neural impulses, it's the substance of the entire network. That said, Novamente would be far better at it than we. With the ability to understand it's own code, NM could just rattle off the relevant parameters into declarative memory. Making this declarative knowledge useful would require understanding how it functions though. That would be the tricky part. -Brad ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
