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From: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Jack is flying his kite (was Re: AI - the real problem).
Message-ID: <1457@ucl-cs.uucp>
Date: 19 Feb 91 15:39:30 GMT
Sender: news@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Lines: 35


Gordon Joly writes:
 > 
 > Marvin Minsky writes:
 > > There has been considerable discussion under this subject of
 > > differences between human and animal thought.  Has anyone considered
 > > the conjecture that humans have 3.5 levels of STM, or large=-scale
 > > temporary K-lines -- and procedures capable of earning to use them.
 > > Maybe chimps have only 2.5 layers of recirsion abilities -- and
 > > earlier mammals only 1.5.  This could account for many aspects of
 > > human abilities in language, planning, problem-solving, etc.  And note
 > > the positive feedback: with a larger (yet still small) such stack,
 > > yiou also get more time to put more things into LTM to use as
 > > "virtual" STM stack.
 > > 
 > > For example, Marcus grammars can do a lot of "natural language
 > > grammar" with 3 stack-like registers, but not very much with only two.
 > > 
 > > By "2.5" levels of stack, I simply mean that the first register is
 > > very competent and capacious, the second less so, etc., so the thing
 > > trails off.  That's why, presumably, you can understand sentences with
 > > 2 levels of embedding, but have trouble with 3, etc.
 > 
[...]
 > Does comprehension of natural language... oh damn I have lost my
 > thread!
 > 
 > More later...

Found a thread. In mathematics, there is a feature of some iterations
called "period doubling". For a certain value (or higher values) of
the a parameter in the logistic map, the outcome is chaotic.

The notion that once evolution reaches a ceratin point "intelligence
doubling" takes place, kept in check by (long-term) homeostasis.