Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 228 pages
- Published by: Bantam August 1, 1990
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0553349465
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0553349467
-
Book Dimensions:
8.5 x 6.7 x 0.6 inches
- Weighs: 13.8 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
In the traditional view, all thinking involves the manipulation of symbols. But according to the new "connectionist" theory of mind, human thought arises from the brain's architecture and is generated by the complex interactions of billions of neurons interlinked in neural nets. These vast brain cell networks seemingly possess the ability to change their own connections; experience (not genes) is the engineer that effects the rewiring. Allman, a freelance journalist, offers an exciting, remarkably lucid tour through the labyrinth of this emerging science. Aided by everyday examples and diagrams that lighten the presentation, he ponders how we acquire language and store memories, and discusses machines capable of reading or grasping patterns. He also looks at blueprints for optical computers, in which light is the current that shuttles information.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader ReviewsI've just finished reading the book "Apprentices of wonder - Inside the Neural Network Revolution", by William F. Allman. It was an old book, published in 1989. This book tells us stories about those pioneers in neural network research and development. The most interesting part of the book is about the fight between symbolic AI and connectionism AI. In the end, the author concluded that neither side won and the future of AI could be some form of the combination of these two. I totally agree with the author on this. In the book, in order to show that day-to-day human reasoning is not symbolic (totally rely on logic rules), the author gave us a very interesting study by psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky. In this study, subjects were given a short description of a person and then asked to guess which professions and hobbies the person was most likely to have. Here we have: Russ is 34 years old. He is intelligent, but unimaginative, compulsive, and generally lifeless. In school, he was strong in mathematics but weak in social studies and humanities. Please rank in oder the following statements by their probability, using 1 for the most probable and 8 for the least probable. <ul
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