west@NPRDC.ARPA (Larry West) (01/27/86)
In AIList V4 #15, Jean-Francois Rit said: ``I don't feel that a major problem for AI researchers is understanding the nature of computation, I think the AI point of view is much (maybe too much) broader or at least OPEN toward The "real" universe.'' I agree that those who are doing Expert Systems or similar kinds of programming need not worry too much about what a computation is nor how it is acheived. But those in Cognitive Science -- those interested in how brains do the things they do so well -- might well be interested in formalisms to help grasp the underlying processes of computation. On the other hand, my prejudice is that these are not yet understood in Theoretical Computer Science, either, and may not even be of interest to those in the field (TCS). Still, Parallel Distributed Processing or Connectionism seems to hold much promise for lower-level information processing, and perhaps higher-level as well, though that's harder to see at this point. See, e.g., Hinton & Anderson's *Parallel Models of Associative Memory* (Erlbaum, 1981), or Hinton's and Feldman's articles in the April 1985 BYTE magazine, or Minsky and Papert's *Perceptrons* or ... well, further references supplied on demand. My opinion would thus be not to exclude TCS out of hand, but don't go out of your way (KIL) looking for articles/ messages/seminar announcements relevant to AIList, either. Larry West (programmer) west@nprdc.ARPA UCSD Institute for Cognitive Science La Jolla, CA 92093