spam@sun.soe.UUCP (Crunchy Frog,,,) (10/24/88)
I am currently in the "proposal" stage for a undergraduate independant study course. The way I have designed the work so far, I will be doing one credit hour each in Cognitive Psych, Philosophy, and AI. I have had the "traditional" undergrad AI background, and what we did didn't seem to add up very well. In psych I learned about activation networks, and this seemed to me to be the approach for real(tm) A.I. Unfortunately, I don't have much background in this area. My plan is to a) do reading on the physical aspects of brain; what structures exist, what is there "before" anything is learned, and how things are stored. b) I want to read some of the philosophical arguments about intelligence and rational thought, and c) I want to implement a simple network and stick it in an artificial environment. Questions: 1) Any reading list suggestions? 2) Is there any relatively PD software that I can play with relative to this? 3) I'm going to be using Turbo-C with 768K available. Is this insufficient memory? What data structures are used for implementing networks? Should I allow for an arbitrary # of links, or limit the #? 4) Am I reinventing the wheel? Is research so far ahead in this area that there is no way to investigate the "frontiers" of this field w/o billions of years of research, or will I (as I hope) be able to try something novel with the small goal of simulating some tiny aspect of intelligence? 5) What sort of career opportunities are there in this field? Are Universities doing most of this sort of research? Can I do *anything* with my Comp Sci BS degree this May in this area? Am I doomed to writing subroutines in the bowels of IBM mainframes? Thanks for any help -Roger Gonzalez Please E-mail responses to... -------- Roger Gonzalez spam@clutx.clarkson.edu Clarkson University spam@clvm.BITNET (315) 268-3748