27 Mar Cognition and Emotion
I’m conflicted. I suspect you are too. “Since the time of the ancient Greeks, humans have found it compelling to segregate reason from passion, thinking from feeling, cognition from emotion. These contrasting aspects… have in fact often been viewed as waging an inner battle for control of the human psyche” (LeDoux, 1996, p. 24). In earlier […]
26 Mar Bayes and Search Theory
What began as a study of belief has turned into a strategy for solving very complex problems. Thomas Bayes (/ˈbeɪz/; 1701–1761) proposed a model in which adding evidence of different types, or from different sources, to a problem will change the calculated probabilities for the outcomes of the “reasoning” process. We’ve forgotten what he looked like, […]
25 Mar Generalization and Inference
What do you do when you encounter something completely new, such as a new flavor. Can you identify that it is a flavor and that it resembles some flavors you’ve encountered before? If you knew about bridges from experience, but had never seen a drawbridge, or a lift bridge or a covered bridge, would you be able […]
24 Mar School of Hard Knocks
Are you a graduate of the School of Hard Knocks, or like me, are you still trying to escape the gravity of freshman year? Lessons about how altitude affects physical objects may be learned by slipping and falling down a few stairs. These lessons become ingrained early. Burned fingers have a profound impact. Notions of hot and cold, […]
22 Mar Common Sense and Thresholds
Finding Thresholds Threshold conditions are boundaries between states, and they exist everywhere, affecting everything. From a computational perspective, thresholds are a valuable tool for limiting the problem space to within manageable limits. In other words, knowing where the edges are can help us computationally color inside the lines. How could we determine a threshold? Observing, […]
20 Mar Section 4 Intro – Perception and Cognition
Wha’cha Thinking? All the developers in the world could work forever to try to imitate brain functions, and even if they begin with a good understanding of the physiology of the brain and the microscopic mechanisms of electrical transmission between neurons, would have great difficulty passing a Turing test without some knowledge of perception, memory and cognition. Add Searle’s more demanding Chinese […]
20 Mar Thresholds in Fuzzy Logic
At what point does temperature change from cold to hot? Tell a person (or a computer) that the beach will be closed if the water is too cold, and their interpretation may differ from yours. This statement is subjective, as are many of the values applied to the thermometer at right. But if you tell […]
15 Mar The Random Hamlet
For building an automated language understanding and translation system, I believe that adding random factors to the model for “fuzzy” reasoning is needed and important. The questions are: How do we use random factors to improve the outcomes of the process? Where do we insert random factors into the model? How do we implement random […]
14 Mar That’s so Random!
Random Probability Theory Some things are difficult to predict, and some are nearly impossible to predict. The further a thing gets from predictable, the more nearly it approaches randomness. It may seem silly to try to define chaos or randomness or anything that spends its entire existence trying to defy definition, but some of us […]
13 Mar Probability and Expectations
The sun is pretty likely to rise tomorrow – you can have confidence in that, but it is sometimes said that “there is no guarantee.” Scheduling meetings tomorrow based on the sunrise assumption is a safe bet, but there may be any number of other things that interfere with the meeting. Life is filled with […]