Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!think!yale!cmcl2!lanl!opus!ted From: ted@nmsu.edu (Ted Dunning) Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets Subject: Re: What good are neural nets? Message-ID: Date: 22 Mar 90 15:58:41 GMT References: <68764@aerospace.AERO.ORG> <2355@rnd.GBA.NYU.EDU> <18697@boulder.Colorado.EDU> Sender: news@nmsu.edu Organization: NMSU Computer Science Lines: 24 In-reply-to: bill@boulder.Colorado.EDU's message of 22 Mar 90 04:42:48 GMT In article <18697@boulder.Colorado.EDU> bill@boulder.Colorado.EDU writes: Well, a housefly, controlled by a neural net with computational power similar to an 80386, solves robotics problems no conventional method can begin to attack. We don't understand how it does it, but it's way too early to despair. ahhh.... when pressed, change the subject. the biological plausibility of artificial neural nets is essentially nil. a linear sum followed by a soft limiter is nothing like what a neuron does. it may be that the collective behavior of all sorts of different neurons will converge, but there is no indication yet that neural nets in the popular style will do this. One of the fundamental principles of creative problem solving is not to be too critical of a newborn idea. Give it a chance to grow for a while, then decide. yes, indeed. but let us not over-hype the idea to the point that people will be so incredibly disillusioned that they won't work with it for decades. remember the history of neural nets (aka perceptrons).