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Path: utzoo!linus!security!genrad!grkermit!masscomp!clyde!floyd!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!"GlasserAlan"@LLL-MFE.ARPA
From: "GlasserAlan"@LLL-MFE.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: parallelism vs. novel architecture
Message-ID: <13688@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-Nov-83 10:58:00 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.13688
Posted: Tue Nov 15 10:58:00 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Nov-83 00:13:07 EST
Lines: 22

There has been a lot of discussion in this group recently about the
role of parallelism in artificial intelligence.  If I'm not mistaken,
this discussion began in response to a message I sent in, reviving a
discussion of a year ago in Human-Nets.  My original message raised
the question of whether there might exist some crucial, hidden,
architectural mechanism, analogous to DNA in genetics, which would
greatly clarify the workings of intelligence.  Recent discussions
have centered on the role of parallelism alone.  I think this misses
the point.  While parallelism can certainly speed things up, it is
not the kind of fundamental departure from past practices which I
had in mind.  Perhaps a better example would be Turing's and von
Neumann's concept of the stored-program computer, replacing earlier
attempts at hard-wired computers.  This was a fundamental break-
through, without which nothing like today's computers could be
practical.  Perhaps true intelligence, of the biological sort,
requires some structural mechanism which has yet to be imagined.
While it's true that a serial Turing machine can do anything in
principle, it may be thoroughly impractical to program it to be
truly intelligent, both because of problems of speed and because of
the basic awkwardness of the architecture.  What is hopelessly
cumbersome in this architecture may be trivial in the right one.  I
know this sounds pretty vague, but I don't think it's meaningless.