Xref: utzoo comp.ai.neural-nets:618 sci.philosophy.tech:1108
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!labrea!Portia!kortge
From: kortge@Portia.Stanford.EDU (Chris Kortge)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: request for philosophic reactions to connectionism
Keywords: connectionism philosophy representations
Message-ID: <1738@Portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 21 Apr 89 16:11:12 GMT
References: <370@eurtrx.UUCP> <18496@gatech.edu>
Sender: Chris Kortge <kortge@Portia.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: kortge@Portia.Stanford.EDU (Chris Kortge)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 36


In article <18496@gatech.edu> myke@gatech.UUCP (Myke Rynolds) writes:
>
>I think that BAMs (bi-direction associative memories) and it's conceptual
>parent, ART (adaptive resonance theory) give a profound critique of the
>connectionist models. Grossberg, the inventer of ART way back in '76, goes
>into great detail about how nothing anyone in the connectist school of thought
>has said is new, or even as powerful as what already exists! ART is proven
>to converge on any complexity of input, no connectionist model can claim this.
>They can learn only by limiting the complexity of the input, thus the failure
>of bp to deal with large and complex systems.

Hold on a second!  Why is it, then, that people are using
back-propagation learning on most practical applications?  I agree that
bp has trouble with large systems, but it's important to look at the
*results* of the learning process, too.  BP can learn distributed
representations, which have advantages over strictly categorical ones,
which is what ART learns.  More importantly, since BP does supervised
learning, its internal representation is automatically suited to the
task at hand; ART is unsupervised, and thus it's categories are not
necessarily useful for facilitating the required outputs.

>For all its greater power, [ART] is much much simpliar than these other models
>that cloud the issue with ad hoc hockus pockus. Grossberg's model is nothing
>more than matrix multiplication. [...]

Then why can't I understand his papers?  (Don't answer that :-))
Most likely, it's because I'm a connectionist, and

>Connectionists are generally psychologists and computer scientists who do not
>appreciate the deeper simplicity of math under the outer tremendous diversity.

Well, be patient with us, okay?

Chris Kortge
kortge@psych.stanford.edu