🚀 go-pugleaf

Louis Savain wrote:

>   It seems that current research in AI is mostly involved with finding
>
> new and clever programming methods to do fancy things.  In this light
> I agree that AI has little to do with natural intelligence.  It is for
>
> this reason that the relatively new field of computational
> neuroscience was born, as a way for a group of researchers to distance
>
> themselves from formal logic, knowledge representation, symbol
> manipulation, frames, scripts, etc., and even ANNs.  However, the
> original goal of AI (to create a synthetic intelligence whose behavior
>
> and learning prowess would be commensurate with that of humans) is
> still alive and kicking, IMO.  That AI research went astray right from
>
> the start is no reason to abandon the early spirit.  If anything, I
> think most of the current work in AI should be renamed to "complex
> logical solutions" or something similar, so as to retain the name AI
> for the work in computational neuroscience.  But then again, it may
> not matter all that much.
>   As an aside, my own limited understanding of this subject leads me
> to conclude that intelligence, even though highly distributed within
> constrained areas, is indeed fragmented.  I see a family of
> cooperating subnetworks or agents, if you will, that nevertheless
> remain ignorant of each other's operation in significant ways.  Even
> within the individual agents themselves, I see a large degree of
> fragmentation which would become apparent were there to be a local
> malfunction of some sort.  This, I understand to be your own view of
> human intelligence.
>   Furthermore I see it as a waste of time to entertain the notion that
>
> so-called cognitive mechanisms can be formalized to any significant or
>
> useful degree.  This would be true even if we had a fully operational
> and advanced AI to tinker with.  The dynamic and complex nature of an
> interconnected intelligence is simply too daunting.  We will only be
> able to identify various areas as to their functions, by selectively
> disabling them and observe changes in the machine's behavior.  Even
> then, a good many subtle phenomena would escape our notice.  Trying to
>
> create an intelligence entirely from the top down, i.e., by
> formalizing human cognition or psychology is pure folly, IMO.
> Louis Savain,

Thanks, Louis, for this summary of AI today - I had been looking for
it.   Do you think a reasonable simplification of this would be to say
that there are two camps: 1) Computational Linguistics which models
reality with data structures - mostly trees and networks of pointers and
2) Computational neuroscience which attempts to duplicate the behavior
of nurons.  ?

Does anyone know of any research that attempts to feed the second
approach with the output of the first approach ?   Computational
linguistics can form a pretty accurate respresentation of a stimulus -
for example the parse tree of a question.  Has anyone fed that to a
nueral net, the nueral net responding with a parse tree of the answer ?

  Seth