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From: minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Reasoning Paradigms
Message-ID: <3612@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 7 Oct 90 05:36:45 GMT
References: <9963@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> <3586@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <69347@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <3593@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <21054@well.sf.ca.us>
Reply-To: minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 43


In article <21054@well.sf.ca.us> nagle@well.sf.ca.us (John Nagle) writes:
>minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>
>>Is that bad?  Your locomotion system "learns" to walk, all right.  (It
>>begins with an architecture of NN's that wonderfully work to adjust
>>your reflexes.) 
>
>      It is not clear that walking has to be learned.  The fact that
>horses can stand within an hour of birth and run with the herd within
>a day suggests otherwise.  The human developmental sequence may be
>misleading here, humans being born in a less complete state than some
>of the lower mammals.

I agree.  That's why I said "learned" instead of learned.  But the
point is that there remains a powerful "tuning-up" process that takes
only a modest number of minutes to get close and only a few hours to
get pretty good.  But my point -- and Nagle's, too -- is that we're
born with pretty much the right network, in which the relevant inputs
are genetically brought close to where they need to be, so that the
naimal does not have to explore a huge space and be in danger of
getting trapped in bad, but locally optimal, configurations.

>     If you believe Sir John Eccles, all the mammals have roughly
>the same brain architecture and the differences between the various
>mammmals are quantitative, not qualitative.  Dissection, DNA distance,
>and the evolutionary timetable all point in that direction.  So if we
>can make it to dog-level AI, we should be almost there.  But we aren't
>even close.  

Probably not.  We'll probably discover a small number of small but
qualitatively critical differences, e.g., in the organization of
short-term memories, maintanence of small but important sub-goal
trees, and a few other sorts of AI-type resources.  Yes, comparative
anatomists will continue to say that these differences are small.  But
as we all know,  10 is almost 11, and 11 is almost 12, etc.

What I mean is that Eccles is surely right, in that our huge forebrain
doesn't seem very different from earlier, smaller forebrains.  But
I'll bet he'll turn out wrong on some small-scale functional level.
Something probably happened 5 million years ago to make all that
additional machinery useful -- instead of a handicap.  Some small but
ciritical change on the "management" level.