pattern recognition comparisons

[Geoffrey Goodhill]

re. Mike Mozer's comments about NN's vs. conventional techniques.

> Neural net algorithms just let you
> do a lot of the same things that traditional statistical algorithms allow
> you to do, but they are more accessible to many people (and perhaps
> easier to use).

I entirely agree with this point of view. I argue that the neat thing about
Neural Networks is that they provide insight into what sort of mathematics
may be useful for understanding the brain, and hence how to solve
perceptual-type problems: statistics, gradient descent, mean field theory
etc. However, I see no reason why NN implementations of these
sorts of mathematics, which are constrained by attempting to be "biologically
plausible", should outperform more general methods which do not have this
constraint, for practical real-world problems.

Geoff