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From: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Building a brain
Summary: Training a neural net with an appropriate feedback mechanism.
Keywords: hardware brain
Message-ID: <74600@linus.UUCP>
Date: 19 Oct 89 00:30:33 GMT
References: <14079@well.UUCP> <10175@venera.isi.edu>
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Reply-To: bwk@mbunix (Barry Kort)
Distribution: comp
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, Mass.
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In article <10175@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP
(Stephen Smoliar) writes:

 > There is one small difficulty which was observed by David Waltz in
 > his contribution to the DAEDALUS issue on artificial intelligence,
 > "The Prospects for Building Truly Intelligent Machines."  Even if
 > you DO get the architecture right (and other readers of this bulletin
 > board have been skeptical about that), you may face the prospect that
 > "educating" your device may take something on the order of ten or
 > twenty years.  After all, if you duplicate human hardware, you should
 > not be surprised if you get human performance.

In _Apprentices of Wonder: Inside the Neural Network Revolution_,
William Allman describes a remarkable experiment in which a modest
neural network learned to enunciate English in just 36 hours of
training on a 1000-word text using back-propagation feedback.

It appears that what slows down the rate of human learning is
the absence of a fast and accurate feedback loop.  I think that
is why teenagers become so proficient in mastering computer
games--the feedback is instantaneous and unerring.

--Barry Kort