What is a connectionist net? Here's what it's not.

[alexis%yummy@gateway.mitre.org]

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Just an aside to KELLY%BROWNCOG's note, rather than worry if
Hecht-Nielson's neural net (and I use the term intentionally -- I mean
"artificial intelligence" is neither so ...) is really a connectionist
model, let me point out a paper/result worth being aware of.

G. Cybenko wrote a very interesting paper which proves that a neural 
network with *one* hidden layer of nodes (i.e., one more than a 
perceptron) with a sigmoid transfer function can "uniformly approximate 
any continuous function with support in the unit hypercube".  That is 
to say you actually can do any mapping with *ONE* hidden layer (albeit
often a very very large one).

Cybenko sent the paper to me because of a tirade I went on awhile ago
on this bboard, so I don't actually know if it has been published 
anywhere yet.  I'm writing this without his knowledge -- I'm pretty 
sure he's on this list.  G. Cybenko are you out there, and are you 
willing to say where your paper "Approximation by Superpositions of 
a Sigmoidal Function" can be found by the hungary masses?

alexis wieland.

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