Nadav Har'El wrote:
This is getting wildly off-topic, but...
Ray Kurzweil, in his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers
Exceed Human Intelligence", makes the following observation about human
thought, and how computers can immitate it. If you'll allow me to put what
I remember from his writing into my own words:
He believes that human thought has two modes: "computation" and "patern
recognition". Examples of the former include an arithmetic computation, or
thinking about several options one after another, and an example of the
latter includes face recognition. He believes that chess is an example where
both modes are used: a chess expert, like a chess novice, goes in his head
through many of the possible moves and his oponent's possible reactions (this
is the computational mode), but unlike a novice, he also does some "patern
recognition" on each of the resulting boards, and instantly (without
sequential "computation") recognizes situations which are good, or bad, for
him. This final recognition is the part of their thought-process that
chess-players can't really explain, and is often called "intuition".
Kurzweil argues that a chess-playing program could act similarly - walk the
the (fantasically huge) tree of possible moves and counter-moves, sequentially,
and at every junction apply a neural network that recognizes "good boards",
and prune the tree at that junction if the neural network decides to that
this move is not worth it.
This technique, of walking huge trees with a *heuristic function*, are well
known in AI (look up "A star", "Minimax", etc.) and are not Kurzweil's
invention. But his interesting insight is that Neural Networks are useful
but SHOULD NOT (not only "CAN NOT") be used directly to solve every problem,
but rather should be combined with other computational techniques.
It is arguable that similarly, neural networks should not be used directly
to parse language. It is very possible that language understanding and
generation has both a "computational", or sequential, aspect (reading the
words one by one, following some sort of state machine in your head), and
a pattern recognition aspect.
Very interesting. I haven't read Ray Kurzweil's book, nor heard his
name until a few days ago, when I saw his name in one of the Wikipedia
articles you sent me (about translation). I also read about him and
it's very impressive. I want to write him and ask his opinion about my
idea. Do you happen to know his E-mail address?
If you're interested in what I did with neural networks - I used them to
compose music. If you want to see more details, look at "Speedy
Composer": http://www.speedy.co.il/composer/
The music is very nice :)
Thanks! Unfortunately I didn't have too much time to invest in this
project, but I'm sure that a better quality of music can be reached if
more time is invested (by the right people, of course). I already had
ideas how to reach better quality, but I never had time to implement them.
Best Regards,
Uri Even-Chen
Speedy Net
Raanana, Israel.
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Phone: +972-9-7715013
Website: www.uri.co.il
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