Posts from the founder of Brains, Gualtiero Piccinini.
A team at the University of Alberta, led by Jonathan Schaeffer, has solved the game of checkers. Through brute force calculations, they have shown that when played perfectly, checkers results in a draw. As a consequence, their checkers playing program, Chinook, is now unbeatable by either human or machine. Checkers …
Here.
Next August, I’m presenting a paper entitled “Connectionist Computation” at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. The paper, which will be published in the conference proceedings, is an account of why (some) connectionist systems perform computations even though they don’t execute programs.(Background: In 2005, Martin Roth published a paper …
Church’s Thesis After 70 Years is a very expensive collection of new papers on the Church-Turing thesis. It was published by Ontos Verelag a few months ago. It is edited by Adam Olszewski and Jan Wolenski.An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems is a fairly affordable, sophisticated introduction and discussion of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems and related topics, including the …
The connectionism that most people know about become popular in the 1980s. It is defined, more or less, as the attempt to explain or model cognitive functions using artificial neural networks. The name “connectionism” for this movement goes back at least to a 1982 article by Feldman and Ballard (“Connectionist Models …
I just discovered that the view that everything in the universe is a computing system is “now often called” ‘pancomputationalism’, as Vincent Mueller puts it. Mueller is right. As of today, Googling ‘pancomputationalism’ generates 195 results, beginning with the omnipresent wikipedia article (titled “digital physics”). I had no idea; for all I knew, I …
Vincent Mueller has posted a note on digital states at Interdisciplines. Below is my brief commentary…
