Human marvel

[leandros]

Alfred Spector, vice president of services and software at IBM's Research division (http://news.com.com/IBM+aims+to+get+smart+about+AI/2100-1001_3-981256.html?tag=nl) :

"When it comes to Web searching, humans will make a query, and computers will help them refine it so that only the relevant data, rather than 14 pages of potential Web sites, match.

IBM's approach to artificial intelligence has been decidedly agnostic. There are roughly two basic schools of thought in artificial intelligence. Statistical learning advocates believe that the best guide for thinking machines is memory.

The combination of grammatical, statistical, advanced statistical (and) semantics will probably be needed to do this, but you can't do it without a common architecture," Spector said. Thinking in humans, after all, isn't completely understood.

"It's not exactly clear how children learn. I'm convinced it's statistically initially, but then at a certain point you will see...it is not just statistical," he said. "They are reasoning. It's remarkable."

[leandros]

Computers totally unlike human brain - official

New Cornell study suggests that mental processing is continuous, not like a computer.

The theory that the mind works like a computer, in a series of distinct stages, was an important steppingstone in cognitive science, but it has outlived its usefulness, concludes a new Cornell University study (http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/June05/new.mind.model.ssl.html). Instead, the mind should be thought of more as working the way biological organisms do: as a dynamic continuum, cascading through shades of grey.

"For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or in a string of individuated binary symbols -- like a digital computer," said Spivey. "More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."