Paper on Circuit Complexity for Sensory Processing

[Wolfgang Maass]

The following paper is now online available. It will be presented as
a talk at NIPS 2000. 


    FOUNDATIONS FOR A CIRCUIT COMPLEXITY THEORY OF SENSORY
PROCESSING         

                                by

               Robert A. Legenstein and Wolfgang Maass

               Technische Universitaet Graz, Austria

ABSTRACT:

We introduce TOTAL WIRE LENGTH as a salient complexity measure for
evaluating the biological feasibility of proposed circuit designs for 
sensory processing tasks, such as early vision.

Biological data show that the total wire length of neural circuits 
in the cortex is in fact not very large, if compared with the number
of neurons that they connect. This implies that many commonly proposed 
circuit architectures for sensory processing tasks are biologically 
unrealistic.

In this paper we exhibit some alternative circuit design 
techniques for computational tasks that capture typical
aspects of translation- and scale-invariant sensory processing.
These techniques yield circuits with a total wire length
that scales LINEARLY with the number of neurons in the circuit.

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This paper, as well as an illustrated poster, is online available 
from # 122  on

http://www.igi.TUGraz.at/igi/maass/publications.html

Wolfgang Maass
tel;fax:++43  (0)316 873 5805 
tel;work:++43  (0)316  873 5822
http://www.tu-graz.ac.at/igi/maass
Technische Universitaet Graz;Institute for Theoretical Computer Science.
Professor of Computer Science