Connectionists: Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning

[Thomas Trappenberg]

Dear All,

I know the discussions are getting sometimes heated, but I want to thank
everyone for it. I meant to contribute earlier pointing to an early paper
by Amari-sensei where he used backprop without even detailed explanations.
I always thought that for him it was trivial as it is just the chain rule.
While Amari-sensei is so inspiring and has given us so many more insights
through information geometry, there is also a huge role for people who
popularize some ideas and bring the rest of us commoners along.

I specifically enjoyed comments on deep learning versus neurosymbolic
causal learning. I am so excited to see more awareness of possible
relations that might bring these fields closer together in the future. What
is your favorite venue for such discussions?

Respectfully, Thomas Trappenberg

On Sun, Jan 29, 2023, 8:49 a.m. Richard Loosemore <rloosemore at susaro.com>
wrote:

>
> Dear Imad,
>
> Fair comment, although I heard Jeurgen say much the same thing 14 years
> ago, at the AGI conference in 2009, so perhaps you can forgive me for being
> a little weary of this tune...?
>
> More *substantively* let me say that this field is such that many
> ideas/algorithms/theories can be SEEN as variations on other
> ideas/algorithms/theories, if you look at them from just the right angle.
>
> If I may add a tongue-in-cheek comment.  I got into this field in 1981 (my
> first supervisor was John G. Taylor).  By the time the big explosion
> happened in 1985-7, I was already thinking far beyond that paradigm.  When
> thinking about what thesis to do, to satisfy my Warwick Psych Dept
> overseers in 1989, I invented, on paper, many of the ideas that later
> became Deep Learning.  But those struck me as tedious and ultimately
> irrelevant, because I wanted to understand the whole system, not make
> pattern association machines.  This is NOT a claim that I invented anything
> first, but it IS meant to convey the idea that to people like me who come
> up with novel ideas all the time, but try to stay focussed on what they
> consider the genuine prize, all this fighting for a place in the history
> books seems pathetic.
>
> There, that's my arrogant thought-for-the day.  You can now safely ignore
> me again.
>
> Richard Loosemore
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 1/27/23 3:29 AM, Imad Khan wrote:
>
> Dear Richard,
> I find your comment a bit unwarranted. You could, however, follow Gary
> Marcus' way to put forward critical thoughts. I do not necessarily agree
> with Gary, but I agree with his style. I am reproducing Gary's text below
> for your convenience. Juergan is an elder of AI and deserves respect (like
> all of us do). I did go to your website and you're correct to say that AI
> systems are complex systems and an integrated approach is needed to save
> another 20 years!
>
> Gary's excerpt:
> [image: image.png]
>
> Regards,
> Dr. M. Imad Khan
>
>
> On Thu, 26 Jan 2023 at 04:41, Richard Loosemore <rloosemore at susaro.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> Please, somebody reassure me that this isn't just another attempt to
>> rewrite history so that Schmidhuber's lab invented almost everything.
>>
>> Because at first glance, that's what it looks like.
>>
>> Richard
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/connectionists/attachments/20230129/39bd3d8a/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 38209 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/connectionists/attachments/20230129/39bd3d8a/attachment.png>