What is a hybrid model?

[Ron Sun]

This discussion has been interesting. But I think enough is enough.
So I will shut up after this message.

lev goldfard wrote:
>The labels we use betray our ignorance and prejudices and mislead many
>ignorant followers.

I just don't think the scientific community can in any way be characterized
as being ``ignorant" (or as ``ignorant followers").
Furthermore, I am sure that people can see beyond labels, and get to the real
issues, ideas, and techniques that we have been developing
(which is what we should be focusing on instead of labels).

>An outstanding group of French mathematicians, who took the pseudonim of
>Nicolas Bourbaki, contributed significantly to the popularization of the
>........

great.

>It appears that THE ONLY NATURAL WAY to accomplish the "symbiosis" in this
>case is to associate with each symbolic operation a weight and to
>introduce into the corresponding set of symbolic objects, or structs, the
>distance measure that takes into consideration the operation weights.  The
>the basic objects, STRUCTS. I'm quite confident that the new structure
>thus defined is (in a well defined sense) more general than any of the
>classical numeric structures, and hence cannot be "isomorphic" to any of
>them. 

I am sure this is nice. But I can't see that this can solve all the problems.

All that I am advocating here is some kind of ``pluralism":
we need to try different approaches and methods. It is not obvious
yet which method is THE best. Maybe different methods are good for solving
different problems; this is true not just in engineering, but also in 
SCIENCE (e.g. Physics).
It would be inappropriate to dismiss all the other ideas in favor one.

Finally, there is always a danger of simplistic OVERgeneralization,
which could be misleading, even though I don't share the view of
people being ``ignorant".

Regards,
--Ron

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Dr. Ron Sun                      http://cs.ua.edu/faculty/sun/sun.html
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