On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 04:15:35PM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote: > Okay, to put it in a less facetious-sounding way: It is worth bearing in > mind that biological neural nets are _very bad_ at syntactic symbol > manipulation; consider the mindboggling sophistication and computing power > in a dolphin's brain, for example, and note that it is completely incapable
Representing and manipulating formal system is a very recent component in the fitness function, and hence not well-optimized. > of doing any such thing. Even humans aren't particularly good at it: our > present slow, simple, crude computers can do things like symbolic > differentiation millions of times faster and more accurately than we can. And how little it does help them to navigate reality. > The point being, we tend to try to answer "how" questions by looking for > simple, efficient methods - but biology suggests (albeit doesn't prove) that > the reason we can't see a simple, efficient way for NNs to handle syntactic > knowledge is that there isn't one; that researchers trying to use NNs or the > like for AGI may have to bite the bullet and look for complex, expensive > solutions to this problem. The world is complicated. There are no simple solutions that work over all domains in the real word. > (My own reaction to this is the same as yours, incidentally: to go straight > for symbolic mechanisms as fundamental components in the belief that this > plays better to the strengths of digital hardware. That doesn't mean NNs What are the strenghts of digital hardware, in your opinion? > can't succeed, but it does suggest that they'll have to hit this problem > head-on and resign themselves to throwing a lot of resources at it, in > somewhat the same way that we on the symbolic side of the fence will have to > resign ourselves to throwing a lot of resources at problems like visual > perception.) Human resources, or computational resources? If computational resources, which architecture? -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
