Connectionists: weight guessing quickly solves n-bit parity

[Ross Gayler]

Andreas Wichert has mentioned Dave Touretzky's 1998 query to the
connectionists mailing list: "Is connectionist symbol processing dead?"

The responses to that query were collected and published in Neural
Computing Surveys, which doesn't exist anymore.
However, the paper is still available from the WaybackMachine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170706013814/ftp://ftp.icsi.berkeley.edu/pub/ai/jagota/vol2_1.pdf

Cheers

Ross


On Thu, 21 Jul 2022 at 20:31, Andrzej Wichert <
andreas.wichert at tecnico.ulisboa.pt> wrote:

> Dear Juergen,
>
> Symbols do not, by themselves, represent any utilizable knowledge, they
> cannot be used for a definition of similarity criteria between themselves.
> The use of symbols in algorithms which imitate human intelligent behavior
> led to the famous physical symbol system hypothesis  \index{physical symbol
> system hypothesis} by Newell and Simon (1976)   ``The necessary and
> sufficient condition for a physical system to exhibit intelligence is that
> it be a physical symbol system.''  Symbols  are not present in the world;
> they are the constructs of a human mind and simplify the process of
> representation used in communication and problem solving.
>
> A Turing machine can simulate any algorithm, the same with RNN, but they
> do not explain the human problem solving.
>
> There is a difference, for example human problem solving can be described
> by production systems. The most successful model is the SOAR architecture.
> Such systems were very successful, they learn and can give you an
> explanation for their doing.
>
> in August 1998 Dave Touretzky asked on the connectionistic e-mailing list:
> ``Is connectionist symbol processing dead?’'
>
>
> From ml-connectionists-request$@$mlist-1.sp.cs.cmu.edu  Tue Aug 11
> 17:35:10 1998
> From: Dave$\_$Touretzky$@$cs.cmu.edu
> To: connectionists$@$cs.cmu.edu
> Subject: Connectionist symbol processing: any progress?
> Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 $03:34:27$ -0400
>
> I'd like to start a debate on the current state of connectionist symbol
> processing?  Is it dead?  Or does progress continue?  ...  People had
> gotten
> some interesting effects with localist networks, by doing spreading
> activation
> and a simple form of constraint satisfaction....  This approach does not
> create
> new structure on the fly, or deal with structured representations or
> variable
> binding.  Those localist networks that did attempt to implement variable
> binding
> did so in a discrete, symbolic way that did not advance the parallel
> constraint
> satisfaction/heuristic reasoning agenda of earlier spreading activation
> research.  ...  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 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...
>
>
> 24 years past and not much progress was done. It seems that the progress
> is only related to pure brute force of computers, but not much insight
> beside a wishful thinking. The whole DL movements stops the progress in
> understanding how the brain works. We need some new fresh ideas beside
> error minimization.
>
> I think one of the main problems is the publish or perish altitude, the
> famous Google impact factor. One does not care what some one is doing, one
> just checks his Google impact factor.. This is like the saying, eat more
> shit, one million flies cannot be wrong.
> Like some mathematician said, computer science is not science at all, but
> it force us to follow its ideas.
>
> Andreas
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Prof. Auxiliar Andreas Wichert
>
> http://web.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/andreas.wichert/
> -
> https://www.amazon.com/author/andreaswichert
>
> Instituto Superior Técnico - Universidade de Lisboa
> Campus IST-Taguspark
> Avenida Professor Cavaco Silva                 Phone: +351  214233231
> 2744-016 Porto Salvo, Portugal
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/connectionists/attachments/20220722/85c39c15/attachment.html>