hiebeler@rpics (Dave Hiebeler) (03/03/89)
In article <10143@nsc.nsc.com> andrew@nsc.nsc.com (andrew) writes: >That's why, to avoid the "AI trap", it's maybe best to start bottom-up, >rather than the heretofore conventional psychological/serial-symbolic >approach of top-down (macroscopic) behavioural analysis. I'm all for the bottom-up approach to things; my interest is in modeling physical phenomena (and also some other phenomena, sometimes referred to as "artificial life") using cellular automata. You can't get much more bottom-up than cellular automata; one of the basic principles is that you take a whole lot of very simple things at a very low-level with fairly simple interactions, and observe the resultant macroscopic behavior, which is sometimes quite surprising. I don't much like the top-down approach that many people try to use with AI and some other areas; I don't think it will accomplish as much as the bottom-up method. This is, of course, just a personal opinion. I realize this is not directly related to neural-nets; I just couldn't resist saying something. ---- Dave Hiebeler Internet: hiebeler@cs.rpi.edu (preferred address) R.D. Box 225A hiebeler%cs.rpi.edu@itsgw.rpi.edu Chatham, NY 12037 Bitnet: userfrzk@rpitsmts.bitnet "xue zai xao" "Off we go, into the wilds you ponder..."