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From: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Re: NN Question
Summary: Answering this post was more work than it appears.
Keywords: Bureaucracy, Cruft, Overhead, User Interface
Message-ID: <45922@linus.UUCP>
Date: 5 Mar 89 18:05:39 GMT
References: <32125@gt-cmmsr.GATECH.EDU>
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Reply-To: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry Kort)
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Organization: IdeaSync, Inc., Chronos, VT
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In article <32125@gt-cmmsr.GATECH.EDU> kirlik@hms3.gatech.edu
(Alex Kirlik) writes:

 > Why should a net with only a few dozen neural units be
 > successful at mimicking human behavior that is presumably
 > the result of the activation of a tremendous number of
 > neurons?  That is, why should a small number of units
 > be successful at simulating the behavior of a large 
 > number of neurons?
 > 
 >   ...
 > 
 > One answer would seem to be that there is a tremendous amount
 > of additional processing in the brain that is extraneous to
 > the processing critical to the task being modeled, yet we are
 > only modeling this "critical" segment.

Most interesting computer algorithms have a small section of
coded where the "real work" is done.  The rest of the code
is cruft which handles the user interface and rarely occuring
exception conditions.

When I post a response (such as this one) most of my activity
is in the mechanics (reading and typing, using the vi editor,
and converting my ideas into parsible English).  The idea
itself consumes very little of my neural-network capacity.

--Barry Kort