Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!minsky
From: minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Reasoning Paradigms
Message-ID: <3642@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 9 Oct 90 14:43:48 GMT
References: <3586@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <69347@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <3593@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <69377@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <11@tdatirv.UUCP>
Reply-To: minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 15

In article <11@tdatirv.UUCP> sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) writes:

>..... And since the human brain is,
>by definition, an NN this consititutes an existance proof for a way of
>solving this problem in NN's. 

This is a dangerous rhetorical trick.  Because in the usual context of
discussion, a "neural network" or NN is considered to be a relatively
homogeneous, uniform structure equipped with a relatively systematic
learning procedure.  The brain is at least 400 different architectures
interconnected in accord with genetic specifications that appear to
involve the order of at least 30,000 genes.   

So the performance of brain-NNs does not constitute an existence proof
for ways to solve similar problems by homogeneous NNs.