Charles S. Peirce, the turn-of-the-century American philosopher, liked to talk about the "onelaw of mind." He gave this law many different formulations, the most suggestive of which wasonly five words: "the tendency to take habits". This simple, potent idea is at the heart of thetheory of mind to be presented in the following chapters.…
It is natural to define a random sequence as one which has no statistical regularities (vonMises, 1957). For instance, one might propose that in a random binary sequence 1 should occurexactly as often as 0. Also, one might require that the four doublets 00, 01, 10 and 11 shouldoccur equally often. And perhaps the…
What does it mean to say that one thing is more complex than another? Like most words,"complexity" has many meanings. In Chapter 1 we briefly discussed the "complexity" ofcomputation — of problems and algorithms. In this chapter we will consider several approachesto quantifying the complexity of individual entities, beginning with the simple Kolmogorov-Chaitin-Solomonoff definition. …
The basic principles of multilevel optimization were enounced in my Ph.D. thesis (Goertzel,1989). There I gave experimental and theoretical results regarding the performance of a numberof specific algorithms operating according to the multilevel philosophy. Shortly after completing this research, however, I was surprised to find that the basic idea of the multilevel philosophy had…
Mental process involves a large variety of computational problems. It is not entirelyimplausible that the mind deals with each of them in a unique, context-specific way. But, unlikeMinsky and many cognitive scientists, I do not believe this to be the case. Certainly, the mindcontains a huge number of special-purpose procedures. But nearly all the…
When noise is added to the McCullough-Pitts network, it is no longer a Turing machine. It is astochastic computer — a computer which involves chance as well as the precise following ofinstructions. The error-ridden neural network is merely one type of stochastic computer. Everyreal computer is a stochastic computer, in the sense that it…
Mind and Computation1.0 Rules What does it mean to tell someone exactly what to do? Sixty years ago no one could give this query a plausible response. Now, however, we have agenerally accepted definition: a set of instructions is exact if some computer can follow them.We have a word, algorithm, which is intended to refer…
As above, let us consider dynamical systems on spaces SxE, where S is the state space of asystem and E is the set of states of its environment. Such dynamical systems representcoevolving systems and environments. We shall say that such a dynamical system contains an S.-sensitive environment to extent e ifit is S.-sensitive to…