Dragaera

OT: bois (was: Sethra Lavode vs. Enchantress of Dzur Mountain)

Mark A Mandel mam at theworld.com
Sat Aug 24 13:12:21 PDT 2002

On Sat, 24 Aug 2002, Frank Mayhar wrote:

#> #Mark A Mandel <mam at theworld.com> writes:
#> #> And let's not forget that despite their name, the software constructs
#> #> that their creators optimistically named "neural nets" probably have
#> #> very little in common with wetware.
#
#This is not true.  The reason they are called "neural networks" is that
#the are modelled after the biological structures for which they are named.
#In their implementation, of course, they are quite different, but in what
#they do and how they do it they are very similar.

OK. I knew they were modelled after nerve complexes, but my point was
that they were modelled after *what was known or believed about those
structures at the time NNs were developed*. If subsequent research has
supported the parallelism, good. Although ISTR reading that NNs have
fairly small numbers of links, while human neurons have links to many
thousands of other neurons-- or am I totally misremembering?

#Mark A Mandel wrote:
#> That's simulation of behavior at an insect level. ELIZA can simulate
#> conversation convincingly at a certain level, too. How similar
#> (homeomorphic?) are the innards? How far does it scale toward human
#> cognition?
#
#Considering that the most complex software neural network ever developed has
#at most the complexity of an insect, comparing it to the complexity underlying
#human cognition doesn't make much sense.  On the other hand, though, I am
#becoming more and more convinced that the difference between the complexity
#of an insect and that of a human is a matter of amount, not kind.  It's the
#same set of processes, with some modifications and much, much increased
#complexity.

Well, we'll just have to wait and see.

#ELIZA was a keyword-based recogizer and can't be thought of in the same
#context as a neural network.  For a brief description of artificial
#neural networks, I suggest
#	http://www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/proj/neuron/neural/what.html

Yes, I know the basics of how ELIZA works. I meant that criticism in
concert with the limitations of our knowledge, per my first para above.


-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
   Philological Busybody
   a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel