Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread Mark Waser 

???  Did you read the article?


Absolutely.  I don't comment on things without reading them (unlike some 
people on this list).  Not only that, I also read the paper that someone was 
nice enough to send the link for.


Now his 'new' theory may be old hat to you personally,  but apparently 
not to the majority of AI researchers, (according to the article).


The phrase "according to the article" is what is telling.  It is an improper 
(and incorrect) portrayal of "the majority of AI researchers".


He must be saying something a bit unusual to have been fighting for ten 
years to get it published and accepted enough for him to now have been 
invited to do a workshop on his theory.


Something a bit unusual like Mike Tintner fighting us on this list for ten 
years and then finding someone to accept his theories and run a workshop? 
Note who is running the workshop . . . . not the normal BICA community for 
sure . . . .




- Original Message - 
From: "BillK" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: 
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 10:37 AM
Subject: **SPAM** Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes 
Controversial Brain Theory



On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Yeah.  Great headline -- "Man beats dead horse beyond death!"

I'm sure that there will be more details at 11.

Though I am curious . . . .  BillK, why did you think that this was worth
posting?




???  Did you read the article?

---
Quote:
In the late '90s, Asim Roy, a professor of information systems at
Arizona State University, began to write a paper on a new brain
theory. Now, 10 years later and after several rejections and
resubmissions, the paper "Connectionism, Controllers, and a Brain
Theory" has finally been published in the November issue of IEEE
Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Part A: Systems and
Humans.

Roy's theory undermines the roots of connectionism, and that's why his
ideas have experienced a tremendous amount of resistance from the
cognitive science community. For the past 15 years, Roy has engaged
researchers in public debates, in which it's usually him arguing
against a dozen or so connectionist researchers. Roy says he wasn't
surprised at the resistance, though.

"I was attempting to take down their whole body of science," he
explained. "So I would probably have behaved the same way if I were in
their shoes."

No matter exactly where or what the brain controllers are, Roy hopes
that his theory will enable research on new kinds of learning
algorithms. Currently, restrictions such as local and memoryless
learning have limited AI designers, but these concepts are derived
directly from that idea that control is local, not high-level.
Possibly, a controller-based theory could lead to the development of
truly autonomous learning systems, and a next generation of
intelligent robots.

The sentiment that the "science is stuck" is becoming common to AI
researchers. In July 2007, the National Science Foundation (NSF)
hosted a workshop on the "Future Challenges for the Science and
Engineering of Learning." The NSF's summary of the "Open Questions in
Both Biological and Machine Learning" [see below] from the workshop
emphasizes the limitations in current approaches to machine learning,
especially when compared with biological learners' ability to learn
autonomously under their own self-supervision:

"Virtually all current approaches to machine learning typically
require a human supervisor to design the learning architecture, select
the training examples, design the form of the representation of the
training examples, choose the learning algorithm, set the learning
parameters, decide when to stop learning, and choose the way in which
the performance of the learning algorithm is evaluated. This strong
dependence on human supervision is greatly retarding the development
and ubiquitous deployment of autonomous artificial learning systems.
Although we are beginning to understand some of the learning systems
used by brains, many aspects of autonomous learning have not yet been
identified."

Roy sees the NSF's call for a new science as an open door for a new
theory, and he plans to work hard to ensure that his colleagues
realize the potential of the controller model. Next April, he will
present a four-hour workshop on autonomous machine learning, having
been invited by the Program Committee of the International Joint
Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN).
-


Now his 'new' theory may be old hat to you personally,  but apparently
not to the majority of AI researchers, (according to the article).  He
must be saying something a bit unusual to have been fighting for ten
years to get it published and accepted enough for him to now have been
invited to do a workshop on his t

Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread BillK 
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:52 PM, Ben Goertzel wrote:
>
> I skimmed over the paper at
> http://wpcarey.asu.edu/pubs/index.cfm
> and I have to say I agree with the skeptics.
>
> I don't doubt that this guy has made significant contributions in
> other areas of science and engineering, but this paper displeases me a
> great deal, due to making big claims of originality for ideas that are
> actually very old hat, and bolstering these claims via attacking a
> "straw man" of simplistic connectionism.
>

>
> Double thumbs down: not for wrongheadedness, but for excessive claims
> of originality plus egregious straw man arguments...
>



So, basically, you don't disagree with his paper to much.
You just don't like his attitude.;)

Danged AI researchers that think they know it all!   ;)

You don't think you could call it excessive PR where he is trying to
dislodge an entrenched view?


BillK


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Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread Ben Goertzel 
>
> So, basically, you don't disagree with his paper to much.
> You just don't like his attitude.;)
>
> Danged AI researchers that think they know it all!   ;)
>
> You don't think you could call it excessive PR where he is trying to
> dislodge an entrenched view?


The thing is, the simplistic connectionism he's railing against is
**not** an entrenched view in the AI community at large ... it's just
an entrenched view in a particular subcommunity of the AI
community  And it's not as though he has *disproved* their
entrenched view, he has just argued in favor of an alternative view,
which I am more sympathetic to, but which is also well known..

Perhaps the reason his paper got rejected so many times was not that
it was so radical, but rather that it contained so little novel
content ;-)

Occasionally, the peer review system actually can be right...

ben g


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Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread Vladimir Nesov 
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 7:56 PM, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> And btw, the notion that control is a key concept in the brain goes
> back at least to Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics from the 1930's !!
> ... Principia Cybernetica has a simple but clear webpage on the
> control concept in cybernetics...
>
> http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CONTROL.html
>

I don't like that definition for basically the same reason, but it
maybe explains where Asim Roy comes from. At least they are not
literally insisting on control being a property of the system itself,
according to this remark:

"Of course, two systems can be in a state of mutual control, but this
will be a different, more complex, relation, which we will still
describe as a combination of two asymmetric control relations."

Controller-controlled relation is a model assigned to the system, not
an intrinsic property of the system itself. Also, there is no "may" or
"could" apart from semantics of search algorithm, which is a thing to
keep in mind when making claims like the following, about "freedom" of
controller, and especially when trying to use this notion of "freedom"
to establish asymmetry:

"The controller C may change the state of the controlled system S in
any way, including the destruction of S."

-- 
Vladimir Nesov
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/


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Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread Ben Goertzel 
And btw, the notion that control is a key concept in the brain goes
back at least to Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics from the 1930's !!
... Principia Cybernetica has a simple but clear webpage on the
control concept in cybernetics...

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CONTROL.html

ben g

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> yay ... we all agree on something ;-p
>
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Vladimir Nesov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> BillK wrote:

 Nobody has mentioned this yet.

 
>>>
>>> I got a draft version of the paper earlier this year, and after a quick scan
>>> I filed it under 'junk'.
>>>
>>> I just read it through again, and the filing stays the same.
>>>
>>
>> I have to agree. The paper attacks a strawman by blanket assertions.
>> Even worse, the attack itself is flawed: in section 2 he tries to
>> define the concept of "control", and, having trouble with free
>> will-like issues, produces a combination of brittle and nontechnical
>> assertions. As a result, in his own example (at the very end of
>> section 2), a doctor is considered "in control" of treating a patient
>> only if he can prescribe *arbitrary* treatment that doesn't depend on
>> the patient (or his illness).
>>
>> --
>> Vladimir Nesov
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/
>>
>>
>> ---
>> agi
>> Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now
>> RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/
>> Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;
>> Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Ben Goertzel, PhD
> CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
> Director of Research, SIAI
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
> butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
> accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders,
> give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new
> problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight
> efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."  -- Robert
> Heinlein
>



-- 
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders,
give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new
problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight
efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."  -- Robert
Heinlein


---
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Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread Ben Goertzel 
yay ... we all agree on something ;-p

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Vladimir Nesov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> BillK wrote:
>>>
>>> Nobody has mentioned this yet.
>>>
>>> 
>>
>> I got a draft version of the paper earlier this year, and after a quick scan
>> I filed it under 'junk'.
>>
>> I just read it through again, and the filing stays the same.
>>
>
> I have to agree. The paper attacks a strawman by blanket assertions.
> Even worse, the attack itself is flawed: in section 2 he tries to
> define the concept of "control", and, having trouble with free
> will-like issues, produces a combination of brittle and nontechnical
> assertions. As a result, in his own example (at the very end of
> section 2), a doctor is considered "in control" of treating a patient
> only if he can prescribe *arbitrary* treatment that doesn't depend on
> the patient (or his illness).
>
> --
> Vladimir Nesov
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/
>
>
> ---
> agi
> Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now
> RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/
> Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;
> Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
>



-- 
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders,
give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new
problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight
efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."  -- Robert
Heinlein


---
agi
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Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread Vladimir Nesov 
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> BillK wrote:
>>
>> Nobody has mentioned this yet.
>>
>> 
>
> I got a draft version of the paper earlier this year, and after a quick scan
> I filed it under 'junk'.
>
> I just read it through again, and the filing stays the same.
>

I have to agree. The paper attacks a strawman by blanket assertions.
Even worse, the attack itself is flawed: in section 2 he tries to
define the concept of "control", and, having trouble with free
will-like issues, produces a combination of brittle and nontechnical
assertions. As a result, in his own example (at the very end of
section 2), a doctor is considered "in control" of treating a patient
only if he can prescribe *arbitrary* treatment that doesn't depend on
the patient (or his illness).

-- 
Vladimir Nesov
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/


---
agi
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Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread Richard Loosemore 

BillK wrote:

Nobody has mentioned this yet.




I got a draft version of the paper earlier this year, and after a quick 
scan I filed it under 'junk'.


I just read it through again, and the filing stays the same.

His basic premise is that connectionists argued from the very beginning 
that they wanted to do things in a way that did not involve a central 
executive.  They wanted to see how much could be done by having large 
numbers of autonomous units do things independently.  Turns out, quite a 
lot can be achieved that way.


But it seems that Asim Roy has fundamentally misunderstood the force and 
the intent of that initial declaration by the connectionists.  There was 
a reason they said what they said:  they wanted to get away from the old 
symbol processing paradigm in which one thing happened at a time and 
symbols were separated from the mechanisms that modified or used 
symbols.  The connectionists were not being dogmatic about "No 
Controllers!", they just wanted to stop all power being vested in the 
hands of a central executive ... and their motivation was from cognitive 
science, not engineering or control theory.


Roy seems to be completely obsessed with the idea that they are wrong, 
while at the same time not really understanding why they said it, and 
not really having a concrete proposal (or account of empirical data) to 
substitute for the connectionist ideas.


To tell the truth, I don't think there are many connectionists who are 
so hell-bent on the idea of not having a central controller, that they 
would not be open to an architecture that did have one (or several). 
They just don't think it would be good to have central controllers in 
charge of ALL the heavy lifting.


Roy's paper has the additional disadvantage of being utterly filled with 
underlines and boldface.  He shouts.  Not good in something that is 
supposed to be a scientific paper.


Sorry, but this is just junk.




Richard Loosemore



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Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread Ben Goertzel 
Hmmm...

I skimmed over the paper at

http://wpcarey.asu.edu/pubs/index.cfm

and I have to say I agree with the skeptics.

I don't doubt that this guy has made significant contributions in
other areas of science and engineering, but this paper displeases me a
great deal, due to making big claims of originality for ideas that are
actually very old hat, and bolstering these claims via attacking a
"straw man" of simplistic connectionism.

The idea that engineering control theory could be applicable to the
brain is hardly original.

As one among many, many examples, James Albus has published a lot of
stuff along these lines since the 1970s

http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/personnel/albus/publications.htm

including a great talk at the recent AAAI BICA symposium focusing on
brain theory specifically

http://binf.gmu.edu/~asamsono/bica/albus.htm

Also, Stephen Grossberg's brain theories, going back to the 60s, have
posed a strong role for controllers and analogues of engineering style
control theory in the brain.

The simplistic "connectionism" this author argues against **is** a
real point of view held by some theorists, but it's hardly a consensus
... it's kind of an unpopular, 20-years-old, worn-out meme by now...

And his proposed alternative is simply far less fleshed out that
Grossberg's , Albus's or many other theorists' ideas with similar (but
deeper and broader) conceptual foundations...

Double thumbs down: not for wrongheadedness, but for excessive claims
of originality plus egregious straw man arguments...

-- Ben G

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 10:37 AM, BillK <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Yeah.  Great headline -- "Man beats dead horse beyond death!"
>>
>> I'm sure that there will be more details at 11.
>>
>> Though I am curious . . . .  BillK, why did you think that this was worth
>> posting?
>>
>
>
> ???  Did you read the article?
>
> ---
> Quote:
> In the late '90s, Asim Roy, a professor of information systems at
> Arizona State University, began to write a paper on a new brain
> theory. Now, 10 years later and after several rejections and
> resubmissions, the paper "Connectionism, Controllers, and a Brain
> Theory" has finally been published in the November issue of IEEE
> Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Part A: Systems and
> Humans.
>
> Roy's theory undermines the roots of connectionism, and that's why his
> ideas have experienced a tremendous amount of resistance from the
> cognitive science community. For the past 15 years, Roy has engaged
> researchers in public debates, in which it's usually him arguing
> against a dozen or so connectionist researchers. Roy says he wasn't
> surprised at the resistance, though.
>
> "I was attempting to take down their whole body of science," he
> explained. "So I would probably have behaved the same way if I were in
> their shoes."
>
> No matter exactly where or what the brain controllers are, Roy hopes
> that his theory will enable research on new kinds of learning
> algorithms. Currently, restrictions such as local and memoryless
> learning have limited AI designers, but these concepts are derived
> directly from that idea that control is local, not high-level.
> Possibly, a controller-based theory could lead to the development of
> truly autonomous learning systems, and a next generation of
> intelligent robots.
>
>  The sentiment that the "science is stuck" is becoming common to AI
> researchers. In July 2007, the National Science Foundation (NSF)
> hosted a workshop on the "Future Challenges for the Science and
> Engineering of Learning." The NSF's summary of the "Open Questions in
> Both Biological and Machine Learning" [see below] from the workshop
> emphasizes the limitations in current approaches to machine learning,
> especially when compared with biological learners' ability to learn
> autonomously under their own self-supervision:
>
> "Virtually all current approaches to machine learning typically
> require a human supervisor to design the learning architecture, select
> the training examples, design the form of the representation of the
> training examples, choose the learning algorithm, set the learning
> parameters, decide when to stop learning, and choose the way in which
> the performance of the learning algorithm is evaluated. This strong
> dependence on human supervision is greatly retarding the development
> and ubiquitous deployment of autonomous artificial learning systems.
> Although we are beginning to understand some of the learning systems
> used by brains, many aspects of autonomous learning have not yet been
> identified."
>
> Roy sees the NSF's call for a new science as an open door for a new
> theory, and he plans to work hard to ensure that his colleagues
> realize the potential of the controller model. Next April, he will
> present a four-hour workshop on autonomous machine learning, having
> been invited by the Program Committe

Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread BillK 
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Yeah.  Great headline -- "Man beats dead horse beyond death!"
>
> I'm sure that there will be more details at 11.
>
> Though I am curious . . . .  BillK, why did you think that this was worth
> posting?
>


???  Did you read the article?

---
Quote:
In the late '90s, Asim Roy, a professor of information systems at
Arizona State University, began to write a paper on a new brain
theory. Now, 10 years later and after several rejections and
resubmissions, the paper "Connectionism, Controllers, and a Brain
Theory" has finally been published in the November issue of IEEE
Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Part A: Systems and
Humans.

Roy's theory undermines the roots of connectionism, and that's why his
ideas have experienced a tremendous amount of resistance from the
cognitive science community. For the past 15 years, Roy has engaged
researchers in public debates, in which it's usually him arguing
against a dozen or so connectionist researchers. Roy says he wasn't
surprised at the resistance, though.

"I was attempting to take down their whole body of science," he
explained. "So I would probably have behaved the same way if I were in
their shoes."

No matter exactly where or what the brain controllers are, Roy hopes
that his theory will enable research on new kinds of learning
algorithms. Currently, restrictions such as local and memoryless
learning have limited AI designers, but these concepts are derived
directly from that idea that control is local, not high-level.
Possibly, a controller-based theory could lead to the development of
truly autonomous learning systems, and a next generation of
intelligent robots.

 The sentiment that the "science is stuck" is becoming common to AI
researchers. In July 2007, the National Science Foundation (NSF)
hosted a workshop on the "Future Challenges for the Science and
Engineering of Learning." The NSF's summary of the "Open Questions in
Both Biological and Machine Learning" [see below] from the workshop
emphasizes the limitations in current approaches to machine learning,
especially when compared with biological learners' ability to learn
autonomously under their own self-supervision:

"Virtually all current approaches to machine learning typically
require a human supervisor to design the learning architecture, select
the training examples, design the form of the representation of the
training examples, choose the learning algorithm, set the learning
parameters, decide when to stop learning, and choose the way in which
the performance of the learning algorithm is evaluated. This strong
dependence on human supervision is greatly retarding the development
and ubiquitous deployment of autonomous artificial learning systems.
Although we are beginning to understand some of the learning systems
used by brains, many aspects of autonomous learning have not yet been
identified."

Roy sees the NSF's call for a new science as an open door for a new
theory, and he plans to work hard to ensure that his colleagues
realize the potential of the controller model. Next April, he will
present a four-hour workshop on autonomous machine learning, having
been invited by the Program Committee of the International Joint
Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN).
-


Now his 'new' theory may be old hat to you personally,  but apparently
not to the majority of AI researchers, (according to the article).  He
must be saying something a bit unusual to have been fighting for ten
years to get it published and accepted enough for him to now have been
invited to do a workshop on his theory.


BillK


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RE: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread Mark Waser 
Yeah.  Great headline -- "Man beats dead horse beyond death!"

I'm sure that there will be more details at 11.

Though I am curious . . . .  BillK, why did you think that this was worth 
posting?
  - Original Message - 
  From: Derek Zahn 
  To: agi@v2.listbox.com 
  Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 9:43 AM
  Subject: **SPAM** RE: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes 
Controversial Brain Theory



  From the paper:
   
  > This paper has proposed a new paradigm for the 
  > internal mechanisms of the brain, one that postulates 
  > that there are parts of the brain that control other parts. 
   
  Sometimes I despair.
   


--
agi | Archives  | Modify Your Subscription  



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RE: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread Derek Zahn 

From the paper:
 
> This paper has proposed a new paradigm for the 
> internal mechanisms of the brain, one that postulates 
> that there are parts of the brain that control other parts. 
 
Sometimes I despair.
 


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Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread Bob Mottram 
2008/11/20 Vladimir Nesov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Here's a link to the paper:
> http://wpcarey.asu.edu/pubs/index.cfm?fct=details&article_cobid=2216410&author_cobid=1039524&journal_cobid=2216411


This doesn't sound especially controversial to me.  Clearly there are
systems in the brain which control parameters of the body, such as
heart rate and temperature, in the classical control theory sense.
Feedback control is probably not just limited to these more obvious
examples though, and regulates other psychological processes.

It's not difficult to criticize trivial connectionist systems, such as
MLP, where obviously there is no explicit control or regulation going
on - merely an elaborate transformation from inputs to outputs.  But
in larger conectionist systems such as Edelman's Darwin automata there
are parts of the system which control or regulate other parts.  It
could be argued that control systems are essential for scalability of
a system without loss of coherence.

There may not be any overall uber-controller in the brain though.  If
this were the case then cutting the corpus colossum would cause major
psychological disintegration, which doesn't appear to happen.


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Re: [agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread Vladimir Nesov 
Here's a link to the paper:
http://wpcarey.asu.edu/pubs/index.cfm?fct=details&article_cobid=2216410&author_cobid=1039524&journal_cobid=2216411

-- 
Vladimir Nesov
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/


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agi
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[agi] Professor Asim Roy Finally Publishes Controversial Brain Theory

2008-11-20 Thread BillK 
Nobody has mentioned this yet.



Quotes:

 However, Roy's controversial ideas on how the brain works and learns
probably won't immediately win over many of his colleagues, who have
spent decades teaching robots and artificial intelligence (AI) systems
how to think using the classic connectionist theory of the brain.
Connectionists propose that the brain consists of an interacting
network of neurons and cells, and that it solves problems based on how
these components are connected. In this theory, there are no separate
controllers for higher level brain functions, but all control is local
and distributed fairly equally among all the parts.

In his paper, Roy argues for a controller theory of the brain. In this
view, there are some parts of the brain that control other parts,
making it a hierarchical system. In the controller theory, which fits
with the so-called computational theory, the brain learns lots of
rules and uses them in a top-down processing method to operate.

In his paper, Roy shows that the connectionist theory actually is
controller-based, using a logical argument and neurological evidence.
He explains that some of the simplest connectionist systems use
controllers to execute operations, and, since more complex
connectionist systems are based on simpler ones, these too use
controllers. If Roy's logic correctly describes how the brain
functions, it could help AI researchers overcome some inherent
limitations in connectionist algorithms.

"Connectionism can never create autonomous learning machines, and
that's where its flaw is," Roy told PhysOrg.com. "Connectionism
requires human babysitting of their learning algorithms, and that's
not very brain-like. We don't guide and control the learning inside
our head.
etc

BillK


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