Connectionist symbol processing: any progress?

[Ross Gayler]

At 03:34 11/08/98 -0400, you (Dave_Touretzky at cs.cmu.edu) wrote:
>I'd like to start a debate on the current state of connectionist
>symbol processing?  Is it dead?  Or does progress continue?
> ...
>So I concluded that connectionist symbol processing had reached a
>plateau, and further progress would have to await some revolutionary
>new insight about representations.  The last really significant work
>in the area was, in my opinion, Tony Plate's holographic reduced
>representations, which offered a glimpse of how structured information
>might be plausibly manipulated in distributed form.
> ...
>The problems of structured
>representations and variable binding have remained unsolved.  No one
>is trying to build distributed connectionist reasoning systems any
>more, like the connectionist production system I built with Geoff
>Hinton, or Mark Derthick's microKLONE.

Tony Plate is still alive and kicking.  There was a small group of 
like-minded researchers present at the Analogy'98 workshop in Sofia.
They would (and did) argue that methods related to Tony's HRRs do solve
the problems of structured representations and variable binding.  (The
real problem is not how to represent structures but how to use those
structures to drive cognitively useful operations.)  The fact that
these people turned up at an analogy workshop follows from a belief that
analogy is the major mode of (connectionist) reasoning.

The Sofia papers most related to HRRs are:

Tony Plate <tap at mcs.vuw.ac.nz>
	Structured operations with distributed vector operations

	available from Tony's home page: http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~tap/

Pentti Kanerva <kanerva at sics.se>
	Dual role of analogy in the design of a cognitive computer

	related older papers are available from: http://www.sics.se/nnrc/spc.html

Ross Gayler & Roger Wales <r.gayler at psych.unimelb.edu.au> (note blatant
self-promotion)
	Connections, binding, unification and analogical promiscuity
	Multiplicative binding, representation operators, and analogy

	both available from the computer science section of:
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/



Other (non-HRR) connectionist analogy work from Sofia included:

Keith Holyoak <holyoak at lifesci.ucla.edu>& John Hummel
<jhummel at lifesci.ucla.edu>
	Analogy in a physical symbol system

Graeme Halford <gsh at psy.uq.edu.au>, William Wilson & Steven Phillips
	Relational processing in higher cognition

Julie McCredden <jems at psy.uq.edu.au>
	NetAB: A neural network model of analogy by discovery



Also, Chris Eliasmith (who was not at the Sofia workshop) has done some work
re-implementing the ACME model of analogical mapping to be based on HRR's
Check out his unpublications at: http://ascc.artsci.wustl.edu/~celiasmi/


Finally, anyone who wants to know about the Sofia workshop should check:
 http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~kalina/cogsci98/analogy_workshop.html

and copies of the proceedings may be ordered from: analogy at cogs.nbu.acad.bg

Cheers,
Ross Gayler