hamscher@HT.AI.MIT.EDU (Walter Hamscher) (05/29/86)
Date: 18 May 86 05:39:39 GMT From: ernie.Berkeley.EDU!tedrick@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Tom Tedrick) More on Barry Kort's "Problem of the right-hand tail" (ie social persecution of those with high intelligence). My heart bleeds for those unfortunate people on the right-hand tail. How about a Take a Genius to Lunch Week. Maybe we could get some rock stars to do a ``Brain Aid.'' I take it this problem is distinct from the ``problem of the left-hand tail'' and the ``problem of the right-hand tail against the big hump in the middle''. (* * *) Thus we see again how women have a brilliant gift for asking seemingly innocent favors which are really enormously costly. The subtle nature of the problem makes it difficult to pin down the real poison in their approach. And it's a good thing you pointed this out. We men better watch out for those seemingly innocent favors, *especially* from women! Hmm, poison, you say... Speaking of favors, please do us all a favor; keep your grim and pathetic misogyny to yourself. Or send your ravings to bandykin. (* * *) I am studying how machines function in order to find better ways for humans to function. Why not study how machines live in order to find better ways for humans to live. Or how machines laugh in order to find better ways for humans to laugh. Or how machines get over their insecurities in order to find better ways for humans to get over their insecurities. (* * *) (Since it is only recently that the need for rigorous treatment of models of computation has induced us to really make some progress in understanding these things.) Yes, I'm sure there there's a `cybernetic' explanation for all of this. Walter Hamscher
sas@BBN-VAX.ARPA (Seth Steinberg) (06/25/86)
Yes, memory seems to be a scarce resource. There was an article in Science on learning in bees, which explains that bees tend to collect pollen from one type of flower during a period of time because there is a cost to learning about a new one. In addition, learning a new flower squeezes out knowledge about other previously learned flowers. In other words, a bee can be an expert on one kind of flower at a time because of memory limitations. There have been a number of interesting bee articles lately. Writing a computer system to emulate a bee's behavior might be an interesting approach. Apparently they can recognize landmarks, learn approaches to flowers, learn which flowers are obnoxious, communicate locations of pollen, reason about locations and a host of other things, all in a brain comparable in size to a large IC. Seth P.S. Oh yeah, read the next message. That's right ....