hendler@BRILLIG.UMD.EDU (Jim Hendler) (02/06/88)
While I realize that it is incredibly headstrong for an upstart like me to feel compelled to echo the words of someone like McCarthy, I wanted to quickly reply to his note about there being room for many approaches to AI with a resounding ``Hurrah.'' I do, however, want to add one thing: not only is there room for different approaches, but it may be crucial to examine methodologies which are hybrids of the differing techniques -- perhaps the whole can be stronger than the sum of the parts. The notion of logic, connectionism, cognitive modeling, and etc. as different `paradigms,' using the strong meaning of that term, seems to me to be dangerously divisive. The problem is so hard, it is difficult to believe that any one of the current approaches could possibly hold all the answers. Finally, let me briefly note that it is possible to create these sorts of mixed paradigm systems. Not only has my own work shown the possibility of reconciling differing approaches to activation-spreading (integrating a connectionist network and a semantic network in such a way that they communicate via a marker-passing-like spreading-activation mechanism), but some of the recent work in connectionist natural language processing* and work in structured connectionism** also seem to indicate that systems blending the technologies hold promise. Thus, instead of viewing things as a horse race with each entrant ridden by its own set of jockeys, we should try to harness the steeds together for maximum horsepower. -Jim Hendler Dept. of Computer Science UMCP * Jordan Pollack's recent doctoral thesis provides an excellant discussion of many of these systems. ** The work at Rochester by Feldman et. al. and the work of Shastri, now at UPenn, are good starting places for more info. on the structured connectionist approaches to traditional AI tasks.