What is a "hybrid" model?

[Lev Goldfarb]

On Mon, 25 Mar 1996, Ron Sun wrote:

> Hybrid Connectionist-Symbolic Models:
> a report from the IJCAI'95 workshop on connectionist-symbolic integration
>
> Hybrid models involve a variety of different types of processes and
> representations, in both  learning and performance.

> The hybridization of connectionist and symbolic models also
> inherits the difficulty with learning from the symbolic
> side, and mitigates to some large extent the advantage that the purely
> connectionist models have in their learning abilities.
> Considering the importance of learning, in both modeling cognition and
> building intelligent systems, it is  crucial for researchers  in this area
> to pay more attention to ways of enhancing hybrid models
> in this regard  and to putting  learning back into hybrid models.


I guess this is as good time as any to raise the following issue.  From
the mathematical perspective, I have never seen (in mathematics) HYBRID
models. (Mathematicians don't use the term.) Hence a question: How are we
to understand this term outside our mathematical experience?


     Lev Goldfarb
                       Tel: 506-453-4566       Fax: 506-453-3566

http://wwwos2.cs.unb.ca/profs/goldfarb/goldfarb.htm