are they worth the effort II

[Javier Movellan]

Please send your thoughts to connectionists so that we  all can be
instructed about the advantages of distributed representations.


By the way, I already got two responses that I will sumarize bellow. 

Response number one provided the following arguments:

1- Brain uses distributed representations. He cites Lashley's (1929)
experiments where rats show graceful performance degradation when they
were partially deprived of their cortex.

2- Distributed representations are more resistant to degradation. He
claims this may have military implications (systems resistant to enemy
fire type of thing). 

[ OK does anybody out ther have data showing that distributed
representations are more noise resistant than  local representations ? I
mean one can always clone the local representations and get noise
resistance that way -Javier ]


3- He claims distributed representations performed very well in his
research projects.

[ Unfortunately he confuses distributed representations with
backpropagation (BP). It is BP that worked well. It is always possible
to force BP to develop local representations and perhaps it would work
better that way. -Javier ]


Response number two claims that *very* distributed representations are
probably the wrong way to go. He said  "Sligthly" distributed
representations (like the ones used in Kruschke's ALCOVE model) are
better. Unfortunately he does not provide any data supporting this point.


I just got response # 3, which claims that distributed representations
performed consistently better than local in the NETtalk domain and in
isolated letter speech.

[ Tom, could you send me some references ? Thanks - Javier ]




-- Javier