Connectionists: Stephen Hanson in conversation with Geoff Hinton

[Juyang Weng]

Dear Gary,

As my reply to Asim Roy indicated, the parts and whole problem that Geoff
Hinton considered is ill-posed since it bypasses how a brain network
segments the "whole" from 1000 parts in the cluttered scene.  Only 10 parts
belong to the whole.

The relation problem has also been solved and mathematically proven if one
understands emergent universal Turing machines using a
Developmental Network (DN).   The solution to relation is a special case of
the solution to the compositionality problem which is a special case of the
emergent universal Turing machine.

I am not telling you "a son looks like his father because the father makes
money to feed the son".   The solution is supported by biology and a
mathematical proof.

Best regards,
-John

Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2022 07:57:34 -0800
From: Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu>
To: Juyang Weng <juyang.weng at gmail.com>
Cc: Post Connectionists <connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Connectionists: Stephen Hanson in conversation with Geoff
        Hinton
Message-ID: <D0E77E54-78C0-4605-B40C-434E2B8F1E7C at nyu.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Dear John,

I agree with you that cluttered scenes are critical, but Geoff?s GLOM paper
[https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/glomfinal.pdf] might actually
have some relevance. It may well be that we need to do a better job with
parts and whole before we can fully address clutter, and Geoff is certainly
taking that question seriously.

Geoff?s ?Stable islands of identical vectors? do sound suspiciously like
symbols to me (in a good way!), but regardless, they seem to me to be a
plausible candidate as a foundation for coping with clutter.

And not just cluttered scenes, but also relations between multiple objects
in a scene, which is another example of the broader issue you raise,
challenging for pure MLPs but critical for deeper AI.

Gary

-- 
Juyang (John) Weng
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