On Monday 23 April 2007 10:03, Matt Mahoney wrote: > ... The brain is a billion times slower per step, has only about 7 > words of short term memory, ...
For some appropriate meaning of "word" -- I'd suggest that "frame" might be more useful in thinking about what's going on. One of Miller's magical 7+/-2 "items" or "chunks" could be any coherent memory or concept (e.g. "That time we were in San francisco and saw the street clown with the bush near Fisherman's Wharf.") I conjecture that the reason there is such a limited number of them is that each one is actually a copy of the entire semantic net (and not just, say, a pointer into it) which has a full-fledged activation pattern, connection strengths, etc, distinct from that of the other "items" in STM. We really are pigs in space when it comes to discrete symbol manipulation such as arithmetic or logic. It's actually harder (mentally) to do a multiplication step such as 8*7=56 than to catch a Frisbee -- and I claim we're using essentially the same mechanisms: recognize an entire frame, search/interpolate memory for the appropriate response, and actuate it. It's harder because it takes more effort, not less, to block out all the extraneous info from the senses in the "mental exercise". Someone who's just learned the rules of chess isn't a hell of a lot better than a computer when it comes to picking moves. A chess master manages to pack a lot more into his representation of any given position than the bare coordinates of the pieces -- his frame for a position is just as complex as the frame any of us has for any real-world situation. Similarly, understanding a sentence is a sequence of reconfigurations of the entire network, each of which reflects the partial possible world as created by the words heard thus far, and primes the interpretation process for the next one for meaning disambiguation, pronoun reference, and the like. For those of you playing with NL, here's an easy problem: show how your system would understand the same meaning from these two sentences: 1. Henry was a 17-year-old boy. 2. Henry was a lad of some 17 summers. Here's a hard problem: represent the *difference* in meaning between the two. 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
