Reconfigurable Learning Machines (RLM): motivations

[Lev Goldfarb]

The model that I will outline in the next posting was motivated, on the
one hand, by the informal considerations similar to those that motivated
connectionism, and on the other hand, by the formal considerations that
are fundamentally different. The formal considerations can be stated
informally as follows: each object (event) in the environment, depending
on the specific recognition goal, can belong to to an unbounded number of
possible categories (classes). Since these categories are not and can not
be learned simultaneously and especially because their recognition
requires a DYNAMIC (EVOLVING) concept of object similarity, it is very
useful to think about the learning process as the process of computation
of the SIMILARITY FIELD, or metric field, induced in the environment by
the corresponding learning task.