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From: jqj@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (J Q Johnson)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: Computational ability of houseflies
Message-ID: <366@gvax.cs.cornell.edu>
Date: Tue, 6-May-86 05:34:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: gvax.366
Posted: Tue May  6 05:34:35 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 10-May-86 12:20:43 EDT
References: <3080@ncsu.UUCP> <2121@peora.UUCP> <171@ci-dandelion.UUCP>
Reply-To: jqj@gvax.UUCP (J Q Johnson)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 21

In article <171@ci-dandelion.UUCP> carl@ci-dandelion.UUCP writes:
>For more on this subject, I would recommend _Parallel Models of
>Associative Memory_ by Geoffrey Hinton and James Anderson.  

The interested reader should also see more recent work by Anderson.  It
should be noted that these models are the subject of substantial debate
in cognitive psychology, and should not be taken as gospel.  It is not
even clear that they are Turing-complete.  In general, my view is that
they probably do provide a plausible model for memory and for some
types of cognition, but do not really address the issues of perception
at all (one gets the impression that perception depends more on
mode-specific hardwired processes, "special purpose I/O firmware", if
you will).

Further discussion in the above vein might better move to a different
news group.  It belongs here only to the extent that it offers specific
computer architectural ideas.  Note, however, that the mind is far from
the only (or most accessible) source for such novel ideas; perhaps we
should study more carefully the information processing mechanisms and
communications patterns in hive animals such as bees to see if we can
find any useful ideas THERE for multiprocessor systems!