Seeing red

[emjay]

So, fair to say that limited to just the learning bit, the core of cognition, as it were...you think that it's a loaded gun, the "first shot" giving the context and content that will build a more complex (and hopefully representative) system, a full(er) cognitive view,  through self organization?

What are the weaknesses of the type of nn you're most familiar with, and what are it's practical dependencies?  
(HF /w mafia, see you when you get back)

I guess that's what I'm saying   It will find the statistical regularities in the environment it's presented with... so if there is a stable environment out there it will produce stable representations. I think it will have no problem modelling the physical regularities of the world... the things we see, hear etc, because that's stable for everyone... we both see the same shapes etc... but where abstract thoughts are concerned - because this is all about abstraction... a limitless hierarchy of associations... that's what's so cool about it - I think that's where the real individuality lies because it's modelling things that get further and further away from the source. In other words it will learn in the same associative way regardless of the level of abstraction of the input. And that's how you can come to associate anything with anything. So the model of the outside world I would expect to be roughly the same across individuals but at the level of ideas I'd expect it to be much more variable.

To be honest I can't think of any weaknesses - it's beautiful - though I'll try It's geared towards generalisation and categorisation so things like bias and stereotyping come perfectly naturally to it - as a result of the bidirectional connectivity - but these things tend to do more harm than good in the world these days, especially when combined with emotion. And actually figuring out how it associates emotion with it is part of the fun... how certain contexts are activated depending on your needs so if you're hungry food comes to mind and you'll probably see food in an inkblot... that is to say your perception is biased towards looking for food. I talk about individual contexts and that's one thing... any related set of associations is a context... but life itself is like one big ever changing context bound together by your environment as you progress through life; you return to your senses - your actual environment - after thinking and everything in it has associations. So it really can be a case of 'out of sight out of mind'. I said about boot strapping before. A context can be refreshed with very little input... so say I'm doing a programming project... that context... everything I learn relating to that stays active or at least 'primed' in my mind because once a stable context exists it stays active for quite some time and biases the network such that it will be easy to 'refresh' with very little input... that little input will cascade through the context according to the principles of bidirectional feedback and bring it back up to full strength. So in my programming project if I leave the computer and come back to it later I still remember what to do etc. But if I come back to a programming project after a long time, when the context is no longer active, I have to activate the context from scratch if I want access to the same assumptions I had before. Which is a lot harder because not only is the bias no longer active, I've also forgotten how to trigger it, so have to poke around its edges until I can activate it again... but I can activate it again... it's all there waiting to be reactivated, if you can only find the way in. It's amazing so I really can't think of any weaknesses

As to practical dependencies, I'm afraid I don't know what you mean?

Thank you I hope you play again sometime... I do the stats and I've seen that you've played one game... it would be really nice to see you down there