Book Reading

I'm half way through this book, “Artificial Minds, by Stan Franklin”. It's a very interesting survey on AI theories. It really makes me thinking a lot. I'm very impressed with author's idea of expressing the mind and intelligence as a matter of degree. I basically agree. But to extend this view to an extreme, even a bacteria can have a very little mind of its own. No, this extreme case is hard for me to accept.

How about cats?

What an interesting UFO sighting I've read from "THE U-BOATS, The Seafarers"! This was reported after the turning point of the battle of Atlantic, maybe in 1943, exact date and location unknown.

Donitz's u-boat fleet was losing badly. And his men couldn't find out what had gone wrong. ( Now we know it's mainly caused by the decryption of the ENIGMA, the appearance of long range anti-sub air patrols and escort carriers; ultimately, by the US industrial might) So they were analyzing all types of suggestions. One suggestion was provided by Lieutenant Hans-Helmuth Bugs, aboard the U-629. He thought the Allies were cunningly using some sort of strange new aircraft. He reported that his vessel had been approached abeam by a flying disk that winked white, yellow and red. I'm wondering if they had ever thought about the possibility of its coming from another world. HaHaHa, this can be developed into a science fiction.

I've just finished the book "Apprentices of wonder - Inside the Neural Network Revolution". The book was published in 1989. The author is William F. Allman.

This book tells us stories of 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 prediction.

I also liked the part of how our common sense mind is irrational. For example, 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.