Hi Shane & Pei, > > For instance, reasoning plays a central role in the system, but I haven't > known what is new there. The basic operations include "forward inference, > subgoaling, grounding, representing alternate worlds, and identity > matching", which sounds strange to me --- they don't form a reasonable > partition of reasoning. > > I'm sure Ben has more to say about Polyscheme vs. Novamente, since he > talked > with Cassimatis during the conference. >
Ben just left for vacation, so I'll stop lurking and take a shot at this... *cackles madly* Polyscheme is firmly in the GOFAI tradition. The two things that make it fairly unique, as far as I can tell, are the "procedural substrate", and the "representational substrate". Procedural substrate is the is the idea that all of the "AI" algorithms can be implemented in terms of a few basic operations, basically local manipulations of a candidate-solution. To quote from the page "Most high-order reasoning and problem solving algorithms (even those from very different subfields of AI, such as logic-theorem proving and probabilistic inference) can be implemented using the same set of basic computational operation". From my perspective (designing and implmenting the procedure representation/learning component of Novamente, with a strong evolutionary bias), something big is missing here; you can't really describe EC or global probabalistic model-building within this framework; Ben and I spent an annoying 15 minutes trying to talk to Nick about this, but really weren't speaking the same language at all. Representation substrate is the idea of mapping every problem into a particular domain; physical reasoning. Arguably there is a lot of cogsci that claims something like this for humans, but that's a separate issue; suffice it to say that this idea is not very Novamnete-ish at all; the Novamente philosophy is more along the lines of "find some domain to reason *effectively* about any given problem", which may well be physical reasoning, for some problems (those involving phsyical reasoning in particular ;->), but certainly not all of them. Regards, Moshe ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
