Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site utah-cs.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!utah-cs!halff
From: halff@utah-cs.UUCP (Henry M. Halff)
Newsgroups: net.cog-eng
Subject: Re: cognitive-engineering, connectionism, etc. ...really flame-ola
Message-ID: <3514@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 31-Oct-85 21:14:21 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.3514
Posted: Thu Oct 31 21:14:21 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 2-Nov-85 07:50:53 EST
References: <2246@iddic.UUCP> <32305@lanl.ARPA>, <1231@ames.UUCP>
Organization: Halff Resources, Inc.
Lines: 31


> From eugene@ames.UUCP (Eugene Miya) Tue Oct 29 22:17:38 1985
> Subject: Re: cognitive-engineering, connectionism, etc. ...really flame-ola
> Organization: NASA-Ames Research Center, Mtn. View, CA
> 
> [I know I'm going to catch hell from some of the psychologists who work here.]
> 
> Didn't theories of connectionism die out in the late 1950s and early 1960s?
> Are some of the AI people of today reinventing neural nets?  Didn't Feldman,
> Minsky, Norman, and numerous others do all this and hash back and forth
> between each other?
> 
> >From the Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers:
> --eugene miya
>   NASA Ames Research Center
>   {hplabs,ihnp4,dual,hao,decwrl,allegra}!ames!aurora!eugene
>   emiya@ames-vmsb
> 
As I understand it hterw was a lot of early work on connectionist networks
of a form called perceptrons, which were essentially one-dimensional
teachable pattern recognizers.  The work was brougth to an abrupt halt
when Minsky and Papert (see their book, Perceptrons), proved that these
devices could not learn patterns that exhibited certain simple dependencies.

More recent research is looking at more complicated network architectures.
Minsky and Papert's objections can be ovecome with devices that have
several layers of units, but there ares till people who find it
convenient to beleive that Minsky and Papert put the whole issue to bed.
-- 
Henry M. Halff                                       Halff Resources, Inc.
halff@utah-cs.ARPA                 4918 33rd Road, N., Arlington, VA 22207