Reprint Announcement

[john kolen]

While this paper does not directly talk about neural networks, it does have
plenty of implications for cognitive science and neural network research.
Implications addressed in my upcoming dissertation.

John

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This is an announcement of a newly available paper in neuroprose:

			    The Observers' Paradox:
	     Apparent Computational Complexity in Physical Systems
				       
				 John F. Kolen
			       Jordan B. Pollack
				       
		Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research
			   The Ohio State University
			      Columbus, OH  43210

Many researchers in AI and cognitive science believe that the complexity of a
behavioral description reflects the underlying information processing
complexity of the mechanism producing the behavior.  This paper explores the
foundations of this complexity argument.  We first distinguish two types of
complexity judgments that can be applied to these descriptions and then argue
that neither type can be an intrinsic property of the underlying physical
system.  In short, we demonstrate how changes in the method of observation can
radically alter both the number of apparent states and the apparent generative
class of a system's behavioral description.  From these examples we conclude
that the act of observation can suggest frivolous computational explanations of
physical phenomena, up to and including cognition.

This paper will appear in The Journal of Experimental and Theoretical
Artificial Intelligence.

************************ How to obtain a copy ************************

Via Anonymous FTP:

unix> ftp archive.cis.ohio-state.edu
Name: anonymous
Password: (type your email address)
ftp> cd pub/neuroprose
ftp> binary
ftp> get kolen.paradox.ps.Z
ftp> quit
unix> uncompress kolen.paradox.ps.Z
unix> lpr  kolen.paradox.ps (or what you normally do to print PostScript)