January 2010
1 post
Goodbye!
Hey, this has been a success! I learned a great deal and finished off the class with an A! I hope some of you can find this interesting or useful. Feel free to shoot me a message on the site if you have any questions!
May you find your quest for knowledge to be a satisfying one!
James
November 2009
1 post
Copycat the Genius
Copycat is a program designed by Hofstadter that through analogy mimics actions made by the user. This can be a little hard to explain so I will give an example; the exact same example Hofstadter used in his book to design his program.
Suppose the letter-string abc were changed to abd; It would then be reasonable to hand Copycat the letter-string ijk and ask if to change it in the same way....
October 2009
6 posts
Unity of Concepts
In the English language, much like most languages there exists words which have multiple meanings. However, when we think on certain words we feel as if they are “unified” to a single concept. For example, Hofstadter makes this example clear with the English word “hard.” When you think of this word, usually one singular meaning pops to the forefront; specifically “not soft”. However, there exists...
Low-Level Perception Vs. High-Level Perception
Philosopher Emanuel Kant suggested that there exists two main structures which house human perception. The first of which is Sensibility. This is the low-level sensory input we take in constantly via our retina, ear drums, etc. It is like the tape recorder or video camera which receives input but does nothing with it. He thought that sensory perception was uninteresting.
The second part of...
The Eliza Effect
AI has at many times attempted to create machines which can be described as “thinking machines”. However, a great many of these attempts have produced results which only appear to have worked. All too often people view or hear about the results of one of these machines and equate the ability of these machines to that of true human intelligence. This is known as the Eliza effect: an effect named...
Magic Parallel and Probably No Chance of an...
Numbo is a program designed to fluidly (as if a human were doing it) solve problems similar to those on the French television show Le Compte Est Bon. What strikes me as interesting is the apparent magic involved in its design. Here’s a short breakdown:
The machine operates by housing a list of sub-programs that do all of the work.
These sub programs have an urgency associated with...
Le Compte Est Bon
Le compte est bon, literally meaning “the total is correct” is a game show that exists (or at least existed) in France. The idea is that a contestant is given five small numbers and must combine them using simple mathematics (addition, subtraction, and multiplication) in order to reach a goal number using as many of the numbers as they like (but each only once). To better understand,...
Spoonerisms (and the Machine That Benefited from...
A spoonerism is the usually unintentional act of switching the first letters of two (or more) words. Reverend William Archibald Spooner, ex-warden of Oxford’s New College, was prone to this, hence his name was used as the etymological root of the word. Consider these spoonerisms which Reverend Spooner allegedly misspoke:
“The lord is a shoving leopard,”
and this one, which is...
September 2009
6 posts
Our Statistical Unconscious Mind
Consider this post to be the spiritual successor of my previous post, “Probabilities Play an Important Role to Us.”
Probabilities and statistics are both increasingly prevalent and increasingly useful in computing as an undercarriage in artificial decision making (especially in the sub-field of robotics (see LAGR)). Like computers, the human mind makes decisions based on...
Can Technology Capture True Human Intuition?
Hofstadter’s Seek Whence program extrapolates data from number sequences in an attempt to seek out rules for describing them. This is the essence of the program; to find patterns and other sequences from an initial given string of integers. However, he notes that there can be many different ways of looking at these patterns and it is often the the most unique perspectives which are...
Bottom-Up vs.Top-Down Thinking
Hofstadter puts a lot of effort into unraveling the steps behind problem solving. He notes that there are two main approaches to attacking a problem, which he discusses continually throughout his book, but only for a brief moment mentions by name. The ideas of both bottom-up and top-down problem solving can be applied to many different fields and sciences. Psychologists, philosophers, computer and...
Probabilities Play an Important Role to Us
Since the course is called Computational Models of Cognitive Processes, it’s interesting to note that there are some definite, intrinsic similarities between the human thought processes and mathematical and computational models that stand out to me. Even though the course is just beginning I am getting a sense that probabilities play a large role in both computational models and the way our...
Strong A.I. vs Weak A.I.
When designing a machine that makes decisions and judgment calls, as is the essence of A.I., there are two different paths to take: Strong A.I., and Weak A.I.. Besides the obvious literal interpretation that Strong A.I. may be more capable than Weak A.I. (which isn’t true), there are more formal meanings to the terms Weak A.I. and Strong A.I.:
Weak A.I. is any artificial intelligence...
Buried Treasure
The assignment was to read pages 15 to 35. I stopped at page 24 for the night. Hofstadter was discussing (rather excitedly it seemed) his first major discovery in pattern sequencing at the age of 16. All of that was very good to me, and it seemed like within it there contained a greater meaning about the cognitive processes behind such discoveries. However, what stood out to me was one paragraph...