Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!nih-csl!lhc!adm!cmcl2!yale!cs.utexas.edu!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: <3680@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 12 Oct 90 13:12:38 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> <3642@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <22@tdatirv.UUCP>
Reply-To: minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 23

In article <22@tdatirv.UUCP> sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) writes:

>given the rather specialized definition of NN, is there an accepted
>term for a compound NN network?

and he makes a number of points about the nervous system. As he
suggests, there is more homogeneity at smaller size scales, such as
that of cortical columns in the same functional region, than in the
gross anatomy of larger scales.

As for terminology, I don't think the NN-ers have a language for
compound architectures. And surely, without terms for such things,
it will be hard for them to get unmuddled.  In neurology, they talk
about the variety of "cytoarchitectures" in different parts of the
brain.  But in present-day NN jargon, the researchers generally assume
multi-layer perceptrons as the default architecture: that is,
stratified layers in which signals go only from input to output.

"The Society of Mind" proposes a few terms for describing compound
architectures.  Not a general, systematic, comprehensive langauge,
however, because I tailored them for my particular theory. (Besides, I
doubt that most NN people will want to adopt my terms because they
like to think of me as the enemy.)