book announcement--Thornton

[Jud Wolfskill]

Dear Moderator:
I wondered if the following book announcement would be appropriate for posting to Inductive Learning List. I'd be happy to edit the announcement to meet your specifications. Please let me know whether or not you use the announcement. Thank you.

Jud

The following is a book which readers of this list might find of interest. For more information please visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/THOFHS00

Truth from Trash
How Learning Makes Sense
Chris Thornton

This study of learning in autonomous agents offers a bracing intellectual adventure. Chris Thornton makes the compelling claim that learning is not a passive discovery operation but an active process involving creativity on the part of the learner. Although theorists of machine learning tell us that all learning methods contribute some form of bias and thus involve a degree of creativity, Thornton carries the idea much further. He describes an incremental process, recursive relational learning, in which the results of one learning step serve as the basis for the next. Very high-level recodings are then substantially the creative artifacts of the learner's own processing. Lower-level recodings are more "objective" in that their properties are more severely constrained by the source data. Thornton sees consciousness as a process at the outer fringe of relational learning, just prior to the onset of creativity. According to this view, we cannot assume consciousness to be an exclusively human phenomenon, but rather the expected feature of any cognitive mechanism able to engage in extended flights of relational learning.

Thornton presents key background material in an entertaining manner, using extensive mental imagery and a minimum of mathematics. Anecdotes and dialogue add to the text's informality.

Chris Thornton is Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex at Brighton, England.

6 x 9, 224 pp., 48 illus., cloth ISBN 0-262-20127-5
Complex Adaptive Systems series
A Bradford Book




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