Mike Tintner wrote:
Matt:: The whole point of using massive parallel computation is to do the
hard part of the problem.
I get it : you and most other AI-ers are equating "hard" with "very,
very complex," right? But you don't seriously think that the human mind
successfully deals with language by "massive parallel computation", do
you? Isn't it obvious that the brain is able to understand the wealth of
language by relatively few computations - quite intricate, hierarchical,
multi-levelled processing, yes, (in order to understand, for example,
any of the sentences you or I are writing here), but only a tiny
fraction of the operations that computers currently perform?
The whole idea of massive parallel computation here, surely has to be
wrong. And yet none of you seem able to face this to my mind obvious truth.
I only saw this term recently - perhaps it's v. familiar to you (?) -
that the human brain works by "look-up" rather than "search". Hard
problems can have relatively simple but ingenious solutions.
You need to check the psychology data: it emphatically disagrees with
your position here.
One thing that can be easily measured is the "activation" of lexical
items related in various ways to a presented word (i.e. show the subject
the word "Doctor" and test to see if the word "Nurse" gets activated).
It turns out that within an extremely short time of the forst word being
seen, a very large numbmer of other words have their activations raised
significantly. Now, whichever way you interpret these (so called
"priming") results, one thing is not in doubt: there is massively
parallel activation of lexical units going on during language processing.
Richard Loosemore
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