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From: wendt@megaron.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: simulating a neural network
Message-ID: <1249@megaron.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 21-Oct-86 13:22:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: megaron.1249
Posted: Tue Oct 21 13:22:54 1986
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Organization: Dept of CS, U of Arizona, Tucson
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Anyone interested in neural modelling should know about the Parallel
Distributed Processing pair of books from MIT Press.  They're
expensive (around $60 for the pair) but very good and quite recent.

A quote:

Relaxation is the dominant mode of computation.  Although there
is no specific piece of neuroscience which compels the view that
brain-style computation involves relaxation, all of the features
we have just discussed have led us to believe that the primary
mode of computation in the brain is best understood as a kind of 
relaxation system in which the computation proceeds by iteratively
seeking to satisfy a large number of weak constraints.  Thus,
rather than playing the role of wires in an electric circuit, we
see the connections as representing constraints on the co-occurrence
of pairs of units.  The system should be thought of more as "settling
into a solution" than "calculating a solution".  Again, this is an
important perspective change which comes out of an interaction of
our understanding of how the brain must work and what kinds of processes
seem to be required to account for desired behavior.

(Rumelhart & Mcclelland, Chapter 4)

Alan Wendt
U of Arizona