Re: bravo on the regurgitated pessimism (Score 1)

1. A nueral network is in fact a turing machine. It is made up of several very simple components: a floating point multiplier and adder, an accumulation buffer, and whatever you'd like to plug in for a transfer function, all multiplied several times over. These are all easily designed "chunks" of a Turing machine (Mmmm Fundamental Theorems of Computing class...). Just because a program is non-linear in nature does not turn it into something that is not a Turing machine.

2. The halting problem is one people can solve. You can supply the problem as a GAC. The mindpixel approach can not solve it -- They claim that it can handle problems that are similar, but different from existing ones in its database, but neural networks would not be able to solve them. Rendering one of their claims in need of clarification.

4. You can indeed pull apart neural networks to see how they operate. Do you think the weights inside of one are somehow hidden to us? How are they updated during training cycles? There are tools to transform any feedforward network into a rules-based system. It is difficult to apply symbols to rules generated so that we can *easily* understand how it makes decisions, but the rules never lie...

And "regarding"... : Can it reason? Can it understand? Can it learn? A database does not do these things. The neural network structure can, but they've provided no proper explanation as to how it will operate.

So currently they have a nice project to accumulate common sense information. Good for them. But there's no solid plan to do anything with that data. I wish them luck in developing that plan, but I think there are problems that are going to be extremely difficult to overcome.