Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxn!ihnp4!houxm!hjuxa!petsd!peora!jer From: jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) Newsgroups: net.arch Subject: Re: Computational ability of houseflies Message-ID: <2152@peora.UUCP> Date: Wed, 7-May-86 09:27:58 EDT Article-I.D.: peora.2152 Posted: Wed May 7 09:27:58 1986 Date-Received: Sat, 10-May-86 07:14:32 EDT References: <2121@peora.UUCP> <2900009@ztivax.UUCP> Organization: Concurrent Computer Corporation, Orlando, Fl Lines: 59 > Now, lets say we can implement a state machine (software) which can do > these table look ups (perhaps the table is associative to enable > "guesses"). That's correct, I think... these are associative memories we are talking about (as someone else pointed out)... > But how are states arranged spatially in a nice way? Guessing does > not work, because the flies will not survive long enough to "evolve" > the correct spatial orientation of states. In humans, (as was > mentioned in the article I am responding to), "attributes" are used, > although they may be obscure. Any ideas? That is something I have wondered a lot about. I asked a cognitive psychologist (who is in fact somewhere on the Usenet, but probably not reading net.arch) about this, because I was wondering whether people come "preconfigured" with something that causes the initial inputs they receive to get stored in a spatially satisfactory manner -- i.e., in a way such that different categories are spread uniformly through the state space rather than being lumped together in one place, where adjacent memories would tend to interact and confuse one another. I don't think the person I asked ever answered the question exactly, though, other than to mention that the first few categories people are exposed to do seem to have an influence on the way that they categorize other later things. I presently tend to suspect (but haven't yet reached any real opinion) that possibly in humans there is a hierarchical arrangement of information storage, such that some "top-level" set of remembered states (maybe some way of looking at an input and categorizing it based on some salient attributes) is used to determine how to encode the things about the input that will be remembered. For example, I have a tendency not to be able to remember people in terms of what they look like; I've decided that this is because the set of things I tend to automatically remember about a person when I first see them are not particularly good distinguishing features (the color of their hair, how tall they are, etc; for some reason I never remember whether or not a person has a beard, for example) -- I hypothesize that this is because when I see "A Person", the way I encode their attributes is in terms of hair color and height. Probably, I suspect, there would also be nonobvious pieces of information involved about how to encode this information -- for example, the set of distinct hair colors, a set of height-classifiers ("As tall as Alf"*, "real tall," "kind of tall," "about average," "short," "as short as Sarah"*, ), etc. -- which might also be managed by this top-level information-encoding (categorizing) system. Obviously, that is only a guess. --------- * Notice how the two items marked by stars -- which I noticed yesterday seem to be real attributes I apply to people -- suggest that the categories are *not* predefined, since obviously "Alf" and "Sarah" mean something different to you than to me. However, the names might actually be just convenient tags stuck on the predefined categories by association. At present I tend to doubt this, however. (The names have been changed to protect the category-representatives.) -- E. Roskos Eat your orts!