hharrison

10 ms·

1.
by hharrison 12y ago
I am aware of Minsky's work, see my other reply. I was too flippant in my comment. Perhaps I should have said intelligent behavior , rather than intelligent structures, is self-organized. But, I don't think any approach to cons
2.
by hharrison 12y ago
Yes and no. I am aware of the status of the field (well, AI less so). I myself am a psychologist working on the self-organization of behavior. Yes, we have been using examples like termites and ants for years. But we are far from the mainst
3.
by hharrison 12y ago
Yes. AI/cog sci could learn a lot from this. Intelligent structures are self-organized, the order isn't imposed from above or from some "central executive."
4.
by hharrison 12y ago
The analogy that a mind is like a computer is just that, an analogy. It's used to present the high-level structure of the brain in a accessible, understandable way, not as a logical argument. Actually, this analogy is the foundation
5.
by hharrison 12y ago
Yes, thank you. So many people here are missing the point. The debate isn't whether or not minds are simply too special to be modeled by a computer. The debate is whether or not the mind itself is a computational system I mean, conside
6.
by hharrison 12y ago
I feel like I should share a perspective from Cognitive Science/Psychology. In theoretical/experimental Psychology, the dominant paradigm is a computational/representational paradigm. Take vision for example. The accepted fac
7.
by hharrison 13y ago
Any good editor should be able to figure out the indents when pasting. I'm not an emacs user, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a plugin with smart python pasting.
8.
by hharrison 13y ago
Fair enough. And interesting, I hadn't thought of some of this. SciPy users are certainly doing scientific computing in Python, but it is surprising to get that attitude from the developers .
9.
by hharrison 13y ago
Yep, ggplot is the one thing that I keep coming back to R for, plus the odd statistical model I can't find in statsmodels - which is rarer and rarer. One of the many awesome features of IPython - the interactive python shell and notebo
10.
by hharrison 13y ago
Yeah, I'm a Python convert like the author, though coming mostly from Matlab rather than R, and everyone in my field reacts with surprise when I tell them I prefer Python. They're open-minded, and I'm hoping to convert a few
11.
by hharrison 13y ago
Either the blind person is responding to some low-energy distribution (scattered sound waves, perhaps, or past samplings of the energy distribution, i.e. memory) or the blind person isn't perceiving any more than the spark is (in this
12.
by hharrison 13y ago
Wind is a local potential in this example. An intelligent wildfire would be one whose sparks can go against the wind, because it perceives more fuel in that direction. Also: my definition is meant to include fish and birds, even plants, a
13.
by hharrison 13y ago
I'll try: a system is intelligent if it is able to respond to low-energy deposits (information) with high-energy reactions (e.g., movement) in order to seek non-local sources of negentropy to dissipate. But then again I'm more int
14.
by hharrison 13y ago
Well, to the extent that it's a scientific problem, it sure would help to have a theory. I sure don't expect that theory to enter the public consciousness anytime soon, if at all. But I do agree with your sentiment as far as the w
15.
by hharrison 13y ago
I think the first true strong AI will come from research on non-equilibrium thermodynamics. We need to get down to the basics: where do entities come from that self-organize, more specifically that are able to use information in structured
16.
by hharrison 13y ago
I'm already familiar with some of his work. What did you have in mind specifically? In any case, he may be one of the best in the traditional computational approach to AI, but I think framing intelligence in terms of computation is inh
17.
by hharrison 13y ago
Read the paper I linked and you'll understand why I'm not impressed.
18.
by hharrison 13y ago
Eventually, but strong AI just means intelligence matching or exceeding human intelligence. We already have billions of entities with human intelligence, and it is taking us a long time to produce something smarter than ourselves. If the fi
19.
by hharrison 13y ago
We are far, far from hard AI. If anything, this article shows that we're only just now starting to ask the right questions. And that's even debatable. Plus they're very hard questions. The problem is we have no theory of inte
20.
by hharrison 13y ago
I'm taking a course with this book right now... and yes, I stole it at the authors' recommendation. Textbooks are too expensive and I don't want to carry it around anyway.
21.
by hharrison 13y ago
True that! Okay, you've convinced me to make it a long-term goal.
22.
by hharrison 13y ago
Nope, Psychology with a focus on complex systems, statistical physics, dynamical systems, that sort of thing. Everything from time series analyses that require hundreds of thousands of data points to plain old factorial ANOVAs. Psychology i
23.
by hharrison 13y ago
In MATLAB, R, or numpy, it's the difference between `mean(n)` and manually looping. It's not an issue of algorithmic efficiency, it's an issue of lost productivity because they don't even write a function to reuse (all t
24.
by hharrison 13y ago
Well I'm self-taught so I have to start somewhere. I'm not sure I could put together a stand-alone tool and still complete my Ph.D. program. Anyways I've found most stand-alone tools just aren't flexible enough and I don
25.
by hharrison 13y ago
All true, but the issue isn't really that they could improve algorithmic complexity with more technical skills, it's that they could improve their overall productivity. There's a huge resistance to using source control, so lo
26.
by hharrison 13y ago
Hey, I have no problems with my taxes going toward science. The way it's done is far from perfect but the answer isn't to take away funding.
27.
by hharrison 13y ago
This is so true. I'm in a Ph.D. program and everyone around me is wasting so much time by reinventing the wheel every time they need to code something. So I spend my time making libraries to help them out, but then I get scolded becaus
28.
by hharrison 13y ago
I'm surprised that this point hasn't come up yet in this conversation: the whole point of insurance is to pool risk . The basic principle is that of everyone who pays in, the lucky ones subsidize the unlucky ones. Obviously, thi
29.
by hharrison 13y ago
All the more odd that Data Science is meant to be less scientific than Statistics (if the taxonomy I described in another post is correct).
30.
by hharrison 13y ago
Sounds like you agree with nfoz... you don't always need mathematical expertise ('scientific validity') to play with data, but when you do, you need a statistician. Really, it comes down whether you need to confirm your assum

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