Slashdot Mirror
Online 'Sand Mouse' Tests Neurobiologists
The Metahacker writes: "
A Princeton professor and his former student have created a 'mouse' (really, a neural net) that recognizes the word 'one' as spoken by a variety of speakers. The interesting part? They're challenging the neurobiology community to discover the mechanism it uses, using only the tools available to analyze live patients - observation and experimentation. You can upload your own sound files to test the mouse, and view experiments other scientists have performed. Cash prizes will be awarded to those who explain the mouse's behavior or can train the same number of neurons to perform a new task. You can read the New York Times article about it (free registration), or go
directly to the site."
THAT's Informative? Sheesh, there goes the neighborhood.
The point of the neural net these people have set up is not to have a neural net that recognizes words well; nor is it to have a neural net to recognize words in noisy environments from different speakers. Rather, the point of the research is to study how biological neurons can process sensory information over time to produce a sensation of a "moment." Recognizing the word "one" is an example of such temporal sensory processing, and a relatively easy one to test, so that's why they chose that task for their research project.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
I dread the day that computers, particularly handhelds, get truely useable voice recognition capability. Then, besides the ass sitting in the restaurant bellowing into his cell phone, I can look forward to legions of idiots doing the same with their Palm Pilots. Instead of the business dweeb clicking away at his laptop keys in the next airline seat, he'll be talking at the damned thing. Time to invent that portable HEMP generator.
"Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it"
Richard Feynman
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. --Bertrand Russell
The name of the link, "partners", seems pretty self-explanatory to me. It's for partners of the NYTimes, which I would be fairly confident Slashdot is not one. I assume this is so other news outlets or "partners" of the NYTimes can link to their articles without the registration info.
:(
Is it a stupid way of doing it? Yeah, since there's no authentication check to see where they are coming from. Does that alone make the theft of their service right? That's where I disagree.
Just because a car is unlocked and has the keys in it doesn't give you the right to drive off with it.
I don't know.. I see both sides of this, and it all comes down to morals, which are in serious decline in this society anyway. They provide a service, and in return for that service, they ask for some information. Not even $, just information. I don't see the big deal.
As a webmaster myself, I would be ticked off if I offered services requiring registration, and people got around it, viewing my content for essentially nothing. But then again, I'd probably be smart enough to have some kind of check in there at the very least.
Reminds me all of the Dilbert comic:
"What do our customers want?"
"High quality products for free."
Such is the way of the Internet.
BilldaCat
They don't ahve a right to your registration information... you can always choose to not read their information.
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Except for the running upstairs scared shitless part all of this happened to me too. Then I realized that if I didn't run around the room, thrashing madly while playing, not nearly as many 'interesting' things would happen.
Bite my yammer.
Are you saying John Hopfield should be the authorized examiner of neuroscientists? Absolutely not. Who said anything about athorising anyone? His experiment can be peer reviewed just like any other work. Time spent working on this problem is time not spent working on the brain directly. No - but it might be time spent sharpening the skills required for brain research. Then again - maybe not. That's the nature of research.
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-- SIGFPE
Beyond a certain point - after you've taken your last exam - academics are no longer accountable to anyone. Sure - you get peer reviewed. But what happens when you and your peers all belong to a clique that have a vested interest in promulgating a particular scientific dogma?
I'm not saying that I don't agree with your post, however, at least in the physics community (which I know best, I assume other sciences are similar), as long as the journal you are publishing to covers a large readership, the peer review process works quite well. Science is VERY competitive, and people outside of a certain colaboration (or 'clique') are sure to make sure that everything is right with a paper, or they won't deem it worthy of publication. You don't want people you are in 'competition' with to make false claims, thats cheating. If your opponent (author) in a sport cheats, you (the reviewer) will be sure to tell the ref (publisher) that they are wrong. The peer review process is set up to make sure that the reviewers are anonymous, and un-affiliated with the authors.
--Xandu
--Xandu
I am sick and tired of this fucking stupid analogy being parroted by half of Slashdot and everyone in the rest of the world. Just as Jack Valenti's keys-to-the-department-store analogy is bullshit, so is this one. And now I'm going to explain exactly why it's crap.
First of all, it is an analogy, a word which is based on the word analog which in this instance comes not from the opposite of digital but from the greek related. Note analog refers to related, not exactly the same. An analogy is a simpler, easier to understand (at least for the intended recipient) example of what the topic is like. Not what it is exactly, but what it's similar to. An analogy cannot hold water in all cases or it would not be an analogy, but a directly correlated example.
What do I mean by that? Well, take the following analogy: CDs are analogous to vinyl. They play music. They're round. The CD spins around and a reader of some type reads the music and produces sound. If you'd never seen a CD before, had no idea what one was, but knew vinyl, it'd be a good analogy. But if you then tried to build a CD player out of that analogy, you'd fail. Why? Because there are differences--there must be, for it to be an analogy and not simply an example.
Just the same with the car-as-analog-to-website or other internet service. Finding the keys in someone's car and driving it away without permission is an analogy to hijacking a net service without permission. But it fails after only a simple scrutiny. Why? Because the car is no longer available to the original owner. But the service is! In addition, a car is private property that has been paid for so that the owner can use it himself, and is unable to be used by multiple people at one time. A web page, on the other hand, is designed for use by multiple people and, if on the internet, is assumed to be available for public consumption. In addition, my use of it does not exclude your use of it.
All of the other stupid analogies follow the same reasoning. The portscan-is-like-rattling-the-windows analogy is also bullshit. First of all, the internet is not the real world. People keep saying if you don't want people using your machine don't put it on the net, and others respond that that's bullshit, but it's not. The net is a public network of machines, designed for interoperability. Private houses are not. If we could put a house in an alternate dimension and only the owners and their guests could get there, we would. But we can't, because that dimension doesn't exist. The net, on the other hand, is specifically there to share information. That was the original DARPAnet design and intent, and that's still the design and intent. If you want a machine that is there for you to do work and not to be part of the global network, you don't have to connect it. If you want to connect it, you run the risk of it being out there. It's like if you put something out there on the sidewalk, which is public space.
But that's an analogy, and not perfectly apt, because a computer is private property. Which means breaking in and destroying or changing data is illegal. But tapping it to see what ports are open is NOT. Why? Because it's a private computer in public space, which means that they may have put it up there to make ports available. You can't know until you tap on the ports to see. Now if you get in and do something that is obviously not allowed (and frequently that's why they state it in ftp login pages), you are violating privacy. If you use a public service, you are not. There's no perfect analogy because it's a totally new concept of half-private half-public, without a perfect analog in the real world. In the real world it's either in private space or it's in public space. The net is public space made out of private data. Thus copying someone else's data is illegal but allowed by netiquette (with proper citation). Why? Because it's a new concept, a new medium, without the same workings of the old.
There are many more bad analogies out there, and I don't have the energy to debunk them all. Just remember, if you've bothered to read this far, that an analogy cannot be used to explain all the rules and details of the analog. They just aren't the same. An analogy can only be used to deal with stuff that's similar, and when the two diverge, the analogy fails.
Jeff
This isn't an open-source idea for research at all.
Why? They _already_ know the answer. They're just not telling us so it'll be a "Fun Challenge." It's actually quite insulting to neural biologists to imply that their methodology won't yield results, which seems to be their point.
I suppose that it _may_ yield some interesting results if someone discovered "Oh my! We've been looking at this all wrong!" and invented a new scientific method, but I'm not counting on it.
Many great discoveries come from inspiration rather than brute force experimentation, and this "challenge" would only be reinforcing that.
The paper is correct about it being novel though. Sort of the chicken and egg paradox - bet you can't figure out how this thing works without knowing how it works.
"Just because a car is unlocked and has the keys in it doesn't give you the right to drive off with it. "
That doesn't seem like a good analogy...more like...if i left my car unlocked with the keys in it, and someone came and looked at it...and then it was still there when i came back. No property is removed from someone else...That webpage is still there for everyone else.
Many neuroscientists think that this challenge is a diversion and a waste. Implicitly, Hopfield thinks that they need a challenge that he is the one to give it. Anyone can see why that attitude is potentially offensive. The quotes in the article show this attitude. It's questionable whether solving the toy problem of one (very accomplished, but still human) scientist helps with "sharpening the skills required for brain research."
Seems I have read about this before. A mouse guiding humans, after a long search, to the question to the answer of life, the universe and everything.
If Godzilla did not exist, man would have had to create him.
I had to read this in grade 10. I actually wasn't dissapointed by it. Wasn't it also titled Charly?
i have misplaced my signature.
The registration is for the NY Times article. The "directly to the site" link has absolute nothing to do with getting around registering at NY Times.
Can it tell between 'one' and 'won'?
Second, what I think is cool about this is sort of an open-source idea for research; there is a large community of nerds that while they don't have the stamina for research, are interested in new cool technologies such as this, and would be willing to help if it's easy to do. One thing I'd like to see more of are distributed projects that can use our idle time to put out more cool ideas; I'd love to see the research that created the 'lifeforms' made by a computer put out into a distributed form as to help their research. Here, further studies of their 'mouse' could be done by simply asking for voice samples of various words by people across the globe as to maximum the sample size (they only used 8 in the paper for testing purposes, but the web site seems to be up to about 600). Certainly, there's important issues such as disclosure of invention, but I think projects like these that challenge the community show excellent progress in research.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Does this piss anyone else off?
.. go ahead, mod it down now, that's what happened last time. :\
What makes you think they have a right to my registration info? You know full well that information is not intended for my benefit.
Typical Slashdot.. I shouldn't be surprised, but everytime I see this it just strikes a nerve. If they want me to not read that information, they should be be smart enough not to give links to it. But far be it from anyone at NYTimes to do that..
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Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
> Does this piss anyone else off?
Absolutely not. If it's not for public consumption, then it shouldn't be on the publicly accessible web. If some people care about their privacy, don't want to give any information about themselves to the NYT, and can find a way around the login, good for them.
64 posts in 60 minutes, and all but about 2 are /. in-jokes. They're all very, very clever - but did anyone read the paper and have anything interesting to say about it?
I read it, but I'm not sure I get it. I -think- they're saying that they set out to implement a neural net for voice recognition, came out with something that worked much better than expected.
I think they're saying that the -reason- that it works so much better than expected is a fairly novel reason (meaning not derivative of common neural net principles), and the process of understanding why this novel method works is best understood by treating the whole problem from a biology, rathern than compsci perspective. e.g. as you would go about trying to figure out how some organism that does something in a novel way does what it does.
It seems to me that they go to great lengths in the paper to be "cute" about using biology terms to describe the behavior of their computer program, because they want to emphasize how organism-like their program is. Do all AI researchers talk this way?
It would be really great if someone who actually understands the paper would post a translation, so everyone can understand what they're really talking about.
If they don't want people using it they should protect it the simple fact is they put it out there where it is pretty easy to find and use. Also as much as we like to think we are big and many in terms of the number of views they get in a day we just plain are not. Therefore it takes nothing away from them and it reduces pain for us. The real question of course is why do they leave it wide open? Simple answer their target market can and will not find it. They know they will have some people using it for whom it was not put there for but from the total lack of security on it you must come to the conclusion that they don't care. So yes this is typical /. for the most part smart people doing smart things in a way that most don't think of and that is why we are chaning the world.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
The most amusing possibility is that someone outside the research community may come up with the answer. As this doesn't involve building apparatus, getting a grant, publishing a paper or anything other than thinking, it's very possible an undergrad or a total amatuer will come up with the answer.
Dr. Sejnowski sounded like sour grapes when he called this an "advertising gimmick". Yeah, that's what Fermat must have been doing. Too often scientists confuse the stuff associated with the practice of science - grants, publishing, peer review, experimental proof - with science. Science is what happens in your brain when you're not doing all that other stuff...usually while taking a shower.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these mice. Unsanitary yes, but cuter than Alphas. Might use the IMPS (Infinite Mouse Protocol Suite) Oh, wait...
i don't think ultimately comes down to morals. that partner's info is supposed to be hidden, so i think it comes down to the same thing that's up with decss, people found a way around it. i don't think it's necessary to act as though the l.a. times' partner-only info is sacred. you don't tiptoe around the issue that the security is lax.
or, maybe it does come down to morals, and that mine are simply of the mindset that if you're not able or even willing to protect it, you will lose it. the internet is young and needs to evolve, and to play 'good christian' with this stuff is foolish.
hoobiedoo.
For some time now neuro-biologists (and worse, cognitive psychologists) have been misappropriating and misusing terms and experiments from cognitive computing to justify their often assinine guesses about mental processes. It lets them dress what is essentially bar-room speculation in the clothes of science. Mostly so they can get research grants.
This experiment is calling them out. If they actually get it right then they have some justification in the processes they use. Of course if they fail...
StrutterX
You haven't been around long have you?
Bite my yammer.
The book should not have been written. Alone, it was pretty good. But compared to the shorter version, it appeared spread too thin. Sort of like how you think you get really blasted from the schwag you normally smoke, until you finally encounter some truly good stuff.. :)
Actually, in the seventies they made a movie out it that I saw for the first time a few weeks ago. Nice, but again nowhere near the original.
I have read way too much sci-fi over the years, but this story remains my absolute uncontested favorite. Oh, by the way.. this post is off-topic.
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Pay no attention to the errors in my post. I am the great and powerful Oz.
I liked that book : the end a bit sad, but I never forgot it.
:-() Any ./ reader to use that forum to share ideas instead of trying to break the moderation system into pieces ???
Hint to (too young) moderators : like in "Grape of wrath", this book deals with "slower" people and mices... and more stuff... So mod this mouse up, and let's keep on reading.
"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes.
Published by Harcourt Brace (1966) and by Bantam Books (1967). Reissued in the Harcourt Brace Modern Classics series (1995).
But enough of that mod rants : I read their article, and really like the way they wants people to attack the problem. Too often in the past, neural networks have been treated as "black
boxes, mainly because of lack of mathematical fundations". I specially liked the way they stated it : "the novel essential principles of operation can be deduced based on the experimental results presented here alone. "
I'm planning to read everything tonight (@work now
[Pruneau
Scientists are hardly limited to single unit recording: in addition to single unit recording they can perform psychophysical experiments, do parallel recording, introspect, examine neuroanatomy, do genetics, perform functional imaging, perform in-situ staining, introduce various drugs, to name just a few. That doesn't make the problem of figuring out how brains work easy, but it certainly makes it a lot more tractable than single unit recording.
To use just TWO images for training your net is completely hopeless, and anyone who has any knowledge whatsovever in neural nets should realize this.
You might train your net with a couple of hundred pictures - each classifying a tank or not. The use some additional hundred pictures (none of the same) to use for validation.
Your point though, is valid. Neural nets have a tendency to overspecialize, adjusting the fitness landscape to close to the input-cases. So you have a separate validation set, to stop the training when the validation set matching drops...
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No registration required.
This looks like a pretty cool project, but anyone else concerned that we'll now have folks training it to recognize all sorts of 4 letter words?
/.?
I wonder if opening it up to the general public to do whatever they want was a wise idea.
Anyone remember what happened to that "Post what you want" website that was posted to
- "I am the cheese!"
I LOVE YOU
great comedy company.
A neurologically simple brain for determining whether the number "1" has been achieved? Sounds like a first-poster if I ever heard of one.
My hypothesis: the mouse checks the cid# like the rest of us.
-- Anne Marie
Perhaps they should name the mouse Algernon.
Who will be the first to upload a sound file of him/herself saying "FIRST POST"?
For more information, click here.
1) A door that opens for computer consultants (one with both hands full carrying huge sacks of cash) when he says "open sesame". (laugh, it's funny) 2) A dictation machine for people... oops, that's been done already... 3) A Natural language machine that gives detailed instructions to drivers trying to figure out how to go from "here" to "this location". (this has been done, to some extent.. being able to recognize anybody's voice would make this even easier on said driver)
As easy as some people think SDMI will be cracked... maybe this artificial net can detect the watermark in SDMI and remove it.
I can see it now...Hopfield and his grad student are going to die in a horrible car accident and scientists are going to spend the next three hundred years trying to figure out what he meant. An obscure professor will finally produce the answer in 2391 in a 1300 page paper that uses quantum theory, the psychology of preadolescent children and a statistical analysis performed by a 300 Exohertz computer, but only five people will actually be able to understand it.
The cake is a pie
And now I shall be able to build a voice fingerprint for each and every hacker in the /. community and Dextor's lab will be no more! Ha ha ha! ha ha ha! ha ha ha!
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
I wonder if someone can train a 660 newral net rat to detect all possible "First Post" variation is Slashdot posting subjects and automatically moderate them down. We can then train it to detect trolls in noisy conditions. Making Slashdot better, one step at a time.
Ñ'
So, how long will it be before someone starts teaching this thing four letter words?
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
OH! The controversy! The age old question.. is it right for me to bypass the link? For the sake of not beating the topic dead, and it's almost one boot the teeth away from that point.. but.. It seems this registration info is for the purpose of entering it into a database. Which could help them determine who's reading and who the target audience should be. *DING* Happy sound... Maybe more articles targeted at our diverse slashdot demographic? Right. I'm not registering. Reason? Time issues, Spam issues. Plus it may be there but I didn't notice that they DIDN'T say they wouldn't give out the info to others, and all I need (as a female tech) is another "HOT XXX CHICKS" e-mail to pop up in my inbox while I'm at work. (Oh yeah sure you THINK the NY times wouldn't sell to the porn guys... ) But seriously. Looking at the page I noticed no "no spam" disclaimer, and they are asking if you want to join up with at least ONE known spamzilla. Plus, on final note. No money lost - no harm.
Are you saying John Hopfield should be the authorized examiner of neuroscientists? The challenge is taken as a stunt and an insult by some. Who are these two to tell everyone else how to work? I can see their point.
Secondly, will solving Hopfield's network give us any insight into the brain? He is a leader, but this problem may not be so relevant. Perhaps it won't help. Time spent working on this problem is time not spent working on the brain directly.
The peer review process is set up to make sure that the reviewers are anonymous, and un-affiliated with the authors.
...
:-) A dollup of cynicism is always helpful, here as in so many other areas where humans err. Yes, even in hard science.
Unfortunately, there's a little more to it than that. If you return to the publisher a negative review of a paper written by a respected figure in your scientific community, there is an element of "black mark" against your name in some quarters as a result of the conflict of interest that the publisher has through needing the famous name to appear in his or her journal rather than in a competing one. As a reviewer you're anonymous to the author, but not to the publisher!
And I'm not even going to mention what happens when the journal's editorial board includes researchers interested in the same paradigm or method employed by the famous person, so that publication of that paper validates their own research area
Peer review is a fairly good process on the whole, but I doubt that anyone who's been involved in it [I have] would suggest it approaches perfection.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
What is terrific about this research is not simply that it can recognize a word independently of the speaker, rate of utterance, and noise characteristics. The 'design patterns' used in this system can provide a building block for systems which recognize patterns in many different areas. Generalizing a system like this from recognizing one word to recognizing many seems to be simply a matter of determining which 'word-neuron' is the most excited. Recognizing phrases may be accomplished by using a sequence of 'word-neuron' firings as input and determining which 'phrase-neuron' is the most excited. Presumably, the system works by using some sort of time-delay neuron chain which ensures that all the monosyllables of the word 'one', when spoken in the correct sequence, generate signals which arrive at the 'aggregator' neuron at the same time, thus pushing it over the threshold. (I won't attempt to try to figure out how the -learning- system works right now, which is the really deep part of this :).
I would really like to know which principles of neuron activity play a factor in building such a system- there is a relatively fixed physical model which is simulated in a piece of software; as well as the the interconnection patterns which realize the learning and pattern recognition model. This knowlege could form a great foundation for a general purpose piece of software that could be applied to many areas of pattern analysis.
Mike
Anyone can see why that attitude is potentially offensive.
And suggesting that the earth went around the sun was extremely offensive to the bulk of the scientific community of the day.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Hopfield and Brody are challenging the neuroscience field (and others) to solve their puzzle and demonstrate their reasoning ability. The USC team is working on something that's just what it is, a machine to recognize speech.
There are astronomical data to support the modern understanding of the solar system.
Imagine that Copernicus had not learned anything about the solar system. Instead, he made up a system that they claimed worked in a way similar to the solar system. They told everybody to stop looking at the sky and to look at their system because everybody is thinking incorrectly. Telling everybody that he/she is thinking badly and showing him/her a toy is not the same thing as having an answer.
It had a human ear grafted onto its back.
So what's the news? It was an Iranian ear, but the mouse understands English?
You're probably right. I was going from what I heard in an AI course a year or so back, and it could be that there were many pictures taken, but the pictures were taken in batches, with the tank pictures taken in different light/exposure conditions than the pictures without tanks.
-Splat
Well, let's wait until the mouse can respond to words like "Yeepah, yeepah!", "Andale!", and "Arriba!". Good thing it wasn't a dog, otherwise it would respond to "Taco Bell".
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
Maybe they could train it to recognise the phrase 'No, hold the anchovies'. If they could, it would be substantially more inteligent than the goods answering the phone at my local pizza delivery place.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Our second and more important motivation for presenting the material in two parts is
to open a discussion on the role of deductive thinking in neurobiology. As we have described in
the introduction, we firmly believe that careful and rigorous deductive analysis based on
incomplete knowledge may still lead to novel conclusions and clearly indicate what the most
incisive next experiments are. Nevertheless, incomplete data all too often discourages deep
deductive thinking in neurobiology.
The whole point of doing science is to think. If, as they claim, there's too much data-collection and not enough synthesis, then this is a fun way to get people going.
Good science starts in the lab, but it reaches it's zenith in the shower (or bathtub, if you're Archimedes). Time to pull out Popper and Kuhn and think about how and why science is done.
We've seen things like this before. One of the major problem with neural nets is their tendancy to specialize.. Building a system to recognize one word doesn't remotely compare to a system that can tell one from fun and done while also having the capacity to tell Bob from Rob from Cobb. The experiments posted on the site only show that the system can differentiate between 1 and the other numbers 2-9 and from various nonverbal tones. A neural net will very likely lock on to the specific differences between the sounds of these numbers. Example: A while back someone was creating a neural net to identify tanks on the ground in satellite photos. Two samples were used and the net learned to successfully differentiate them. When other samples were tried, however, the system was completely wrong. Eventually it was determined that the photo with tanks was brighter than the photo without, and that was what the system used to differentiate the photos.
-Splat
I think this experiment could be very important for neurobiological research and maybe other typs of research. There are many fields of science where it is possible to go on forever publishing research without any checks. Obvious areas where this goes on are fields like so-called postmodern literary criticism. But it happens in the sciences too. In behavioural evolutionary biology you can make up just-so stories in paper after paper safe in the knowledge that nobody else can rerun evolution for you and demonstrate that you are wrong. In psychology you can repeatedly perform experiments measuring correlation between this variable and that. By chance one in 20 results are 95% significant and you publish those results as if they are something other than noise. Hopfield's experiment is going to be a sanity check against this kind of work - a kind of experimental control. Here's a situation where somebody does know the answer and work can be checked. A neural net involving only a few hundred neurons. If researchers are unable to reverse engineer this then should they really have jobs supposedly reverse engineering animal or even human brains? We need to see a few more tests like this in academia. Beyond a certain point - after you've taken your last exam - academics are no longer accountable to anyone. Sure - you get peer reviewed. But what happens when you and your peers all belong to a clique that have a vested interest in promulgating a particular scientific dogma? This experiment is a wonderful way to ensure that researchers still are being tested.
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-- SIGFPE
While the purpose of this project is to make the mouse recognize things, I think the greater significance is shown by the doctor's following comment: "I had to use a way of thinking that felt very different from what I normally use," Dr. Brody said. I think that this is probably the most interesting thing in the whole NYT article. By making this into a contest he is not only bringing more interest into the field but also challenging people to really 'think'! This is how progress really happens. It will definately be interesting to see which different disciplines his methodology will affect, especially if his creation is as novel as it seems.
UBU
There are astronomical data to support the modern understanding of the solar system.
That data wasn't available then.
Telling everybody that he/she is thinking badly and showing him/her a toy is not the same thing as having an answer.
But all the models of science are toys, without exception. That is the whole idea behind science, to produce mathematical toy models that hopefully might approximate the behaviour of reality as determined through empirical tests.
Scientists have never had The Answer, and no competent scientist would ever profess to do so -- the relationship between reality and the models of science are in Science 101, after all. But they're getting damn good at creating models that accurately mimic a lot of reality's behaviours, despite the scientific method not having any ability to determine The Answer or The Truth or whatever.
And that's why it is always good to point out the error of their ways to those "scientists" that waffle on interminably without producing hard testable models based on the hard thinking of logic and mathemetics. It takes more than just mimicking the forms to produce real scientific results. Reality checks may be painful, but they're important.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If the data were not available, how did Copernicus get his idea? Science relies on data. Copernicus had his ideas after looking at the available data. Heliocentrism was more than a lucky guess. I hope you haven't been reading Koyre.
I am complaining that Hopfield's challenge is not a reality check. It's a fantasy check. Their toy is not a model of anything. It's a toy. He wants people to come look at his toy. Why? Because he thinks that people are not thinking correctly. How is his toy going to help? It beats me.
I think you're misunderstanding Hopfield's challenge, and both of us are misunderstanding one another. Sciences use models to describe and predict events. We agree. Neurobiologists endeavor to describe and understand the brain through a wide variety of approaches. If Hopfield were offering a toy that models the brain, they would be excited. He's not offering one. He's offering a toy problem that isn't the brain as a test to the community. It doesn't approximate anything in the real world. It is, simply, what it is.
FRTFP!!!!! FRTFP!!!!! First reply to first post! I like cheese! I like goats! I am a l33t h4x0r! w00t! m0d m3 uP b33y4tch3s!!!!!!!!!
Since most offtopic/flamebait/troll posts are short (usually like "phirst pozt"), let's train this thing to filter them out!
I havent been following neural nets since the very early days, but i was under the impression that this [the abitity to distinguish one thing {even a complexd thing}] was state of the art.
...or is it just a publicity stunt?
Is the point more in the competition, were by they can discover the relationship between the 'best guess' on the question model, and the actual workings and consider the implications of this to our [their?] assumptions on how to build a 'net, and indeed how HUman minds work.
Also does anybody know of a good [non-too-tech] site on the present state of play in 'nets?