On Jun 3, 2008, at 8:44 AM, Mike Tintner wrote:
Thanks. I must confess to my usual confusion/ignorance here - but
perhaps I should really have talked of "solid" rather than "3-D
mapping."
When you sit in a familiar chair, you have, I presume, a solid
mapping (or perhaps the word should be "moulding") - distributed
over your body, of how it can and will fit into that chair. And I'm
presuming that the maps in the brain may have a similar solid
structure. And when you're in a familiar room, you may also have
brain maps [or "moulds"] that tell you automatically what is likely
to be in front of you, at back, and on each side.
Does your sense of "3-D mapping" equate to this?
Humans are capable of constructing exquisite 3-dimensional models in
their minds. see: blind people.
Having that model and computing interactions with that model are two
different things. Humans do not actually compute their relation to
other objects with high precision, they approximate and iteratively
make corrections later. It turns out this may not be such a bad idea,
computational topology and geometry is thin on computable high-
precision results, but it kind of goes against the grain of computer
science.
It is not obvious that having that 3-dimensional model and being able
to compute extremely complex relationships on the fly are the same
problem. We can do the former, both as humans and on computers, but
the latter is beyond both humans and computer science. We have a
model, but our poorly calibrated interactions with it are constantly
moderated by real-world feedback.
It is an open question as to whether or not mathematics will arrive at
an elegant solution that out-performs the sub-optimal wetware algorithm.
J. Andrew Rogers
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agi
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