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From: dhw@itivax.iti.org (David H. West)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai
Subject: Re: Edelman
Message-ID: <5076@itivax.iti.org>
Date: 2 Mar 90 18:14:32 GMT
References: <12015@venera.isi.edu> <6595@cps3xx.UUCP> <12038@venera.isi.edu> <5028@itivax.iti.org> <12084@venera.isi.edu>
Reply-To: dhw@itivax.UUCP (David H. West)
Followup-To: talk.philosophy.misc
Organization: Industrial Technology Institute
Lines: 26

[a previous version of this was posted at 1am, when I don't think
 as clearly, but it couldn't be cancelled until morning because of
 local news peculiarities.  Apologies to anyone who sees both.]

In article <12084@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
|My personal feeling is that Holland's major advance has been in the area of
|ASSIGNMENT to categories, rather than the FORMATION of those categories.  Thus,
|the selective capabilities of his genetic algorithms are good for determining
|how an input stimulus should be classified;  but the categories themselves are
|essentially "hard-wired" into the architecture of the systems "genes."
|However, if I am mistake in this impression, I would be very interested
|in having someone set the record straight.

My personal view (nothing as definitive as "setting the record
straight") is that categories are built from sub-categories; at the
bottom, one (usually) hits hardware, and above that, one can build as 
many evolving layers as one has the leisure to wait for.

People who have to get results out of serial simulations before
their funding agencies lose patience will be unwilling to try too
many layers, and will thus tend to (literally or metaphorically) 
hard-wire the parts they are less interested in.  I would expect that
a category-formation experiment would have to involve more layers
than (and include) a category-assignment experiment.

-David West          dhw@iti.org