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From: PLai@cup.portal.com (Patrick L Faith)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Toward an Emotional Computer
Message-ID: <37467@cup.portal.com>
Date: 2 Jan 91 00:10:28 GMT
References: <28884@usc> <MITCHELL.90Dec17113059@gluttony.uchicago.edu>
  <37025@cup.portal.com> <1990Dec30.175326.2309@cs.dal.ca>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 30

I agree with chris R on his point, and find his view interesteing, but
I think that the following paragraph might be innacurate:
> .... etc ...
>But as much work must still be done in the PROPOGATION itself, regardless
>of perhaps a little space saving in the representation.  Also, instead of
>having just a list of internal pointers through which to loop, now we must
>search all the nodes to see if it is in the "group" currently being
>stimulated.  Even with an index, or storing nodes in a tree, that's still
>an increasing time complexity, which we STILL must multiply by the number
>of nodes in the group anyway .. so its a little slower, but probably
>saves on RAM a bit.
> ... etc ...

I think this is true for sequential processing, but distributed processing
works much faster using "emotion" method.  For example lets say we have
a distributed computer with 32000 nodes/processors on a single bus
(in actuallity the bus is multilayered but lets not get into that).  When
one processor needs to send information to another processor it gains hold
of the bus, then sends a message to that single processor.  So with direct
connections, you need to send that message as many times as you have nodes
that are connected.  On the other hand, with an "emotion" based scheme, you
lock the buss once, and send the message in a broadcast mode, and all of
the processors look to see if the message is in their group and process it.
Thus, if you need to propogate from one node to 32000 nodes, the "emotion" 
based method would be around 32000 times faster (not including overhead
which would in reality make it around 16000 time faster).

                                PLai

........