On Saturday 25 November 2006 12:42, Ben Goertzel wrote: > I'm afraid the analogies between vector space operations and cognitive > operations don't really take you very far. > > For instance, you map conceptual blending into quantitative > interpolation -- but as you surely know, it's not just **any** > interpolation, it's a highly special kind of interpolation, and to > formalize or teach an AI system this "specialness" is nontrivial > whether your underlying k-rep is n-vectors or probabilistic logic > formulas or whatever...
Let's suppose we're trying to blend a steamship, which is a vehicle that carries people, and a bird, which flies, to get a notion of how to build an airplane, which flies and carries people. Historically, lots of combinations of the salient aspects were tried, including Maxim's 9-ton steam-powered aircraft of the early 1890's. What turned out to work was adding the screw and rudder from the boat to the wings and tail of the bird, in a body that was of intermediate size. Poopdecks, masts, and the captain's gig were dispensed with, as were clawfeet and feathers. So the creation of a new, blended concept including some features and discarding others from each blendee, as well as averaging or extrapolating others. The Wrights used wing-warping, as in birds, for attitude control, where Curtis duplicated the rudder once again on the wings as ailerons. Such complex blends require a complex mapping to be discovered from the blendees to the new concept; they do retain the character of a blend by virtue of inheriting some of the predictive ability of the blendees. (For example, the plane yaws the same way the ship does when the vertical tail rudder is turned the same way.) On the other hand, somewhat simpler blends can be done by simple interpolation or mappings like the analogical quadrature I mentioned. For example, you will instantly understand "teddy moose" to be that which is to a moose as a teddy bear is to a bear, i.e. a stuffed-animal toy caricature. I'm fairly sure I could define a continuous space in which such a thing would fall out of the simple geometric formula. The key is always always always always always to get the mapping into the space right, which is to say getting the projections that form the abstractions from the lower-level concepts right, which is why I described it as the holy grail. --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/?list_id=303
