Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!helios!jsaxon
From: jsaxon@cs.tamu.edu (James B Saxon)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Penrose Penrose Penrose Penrose Penrose...
Keywords: neural networks, AI
Message-ID: <6663@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Date: 18 Jul 90 15:25:27 GMT
Sender: usenet@helios.TAMU.EDU
Distribution: comp.sys.neural-nets
Organization: Computer Science Department, Texas A&M University
Lines: 31

Well, if nobody's going to do it, I will...

This is a brief note about "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger
Penrose, Oxford University Press, 1989.

He might know his physics but he does not have any clue about
the brain or neural networks.  He got Hebbian learning wrong!
He said that the connection strength gets weaker with less
activation (p. 397)!  Now I was at the IJCNN '90 how many times did
I hear 'pseudo-hebbian'?  Ask Grossberg, ask Edelman.  Ahem...  
And that's the least of it.

Basically the arguments he poses in chapters 1, 9, and 10 have
nothing to do with the rest of the book.  But worse than that,
he brings up points that have long been argued away...

I'm going to leave these points unsubstantiated for now.  If
there's no argument, great.  But, I wish to point out that we
mustn't let creations like this go unanswered!  This deserves
a major rebuttal.  It's up to us to not let the world continue
thinking "Computers can only do what their programmers tell
them to do."  We must educate the people.

Who is with me?

    
--
 ---- \ / ----	  /--------------------------------------------\  James Bennett Saxon
|   O|	 |   O|	  |  "I aught to join the club and beat you    |  Visualization Laboratory
|    |   |    |   |   over the head with it." -- Groucho Marx  |  Texas A&M University
 ----     ----   <---------------------------------------------/  jsaxon@cssun.tamu.edu