Viewing profile — hharrison

I am aware of Minsky's work, see my other reply. I was too flippant in my comment. Perhaps I should have said intelligent behavior , rather than intelligent structures, is self-org…

Yes and no. I am aware of the status of the field (well, AI less so). I myself am a psychologist working on the self-organization of behavior. Yes, we have been using examples like…

Yes. AI/cog sci could learn a lot from this. Intelligent structures are self-organized, the order isn't imposed from above or from some "central executive."

The analogy that a mind is like a computer is just that, an analogy. It's used to present the high-level structure of the brain in a accessible, understandable way, not as a logica…

Yes, thank you. So many people here are missing the point. The debate isn't whether or not minds are simply too special to be modeled by a computer. The debate is whether or not th…

I feel like I should share a perspective from Cognitive Science/Psychology. In theoretical/experimental Psychology, the dominant paradigm is a computational/representational paradi…

Any good editor should be able to figure out the indents when pasting. I'm not an emacs user, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a plugin with smart python pasting.

Fair enough. And interesting, I hadn't thought of some of this. SciPy users are certainly doing scientific computing in Python, but it is surprising to get that attitude from the d…

Yep, ggplot is the one thing that I keep coming back to R for, plus the odd statistical model I can't find in statsmodels - which is rarer and rarer. One of the many awesome featur…

Yeah, I'm a Python convert like the author, though coming mostly from Matlab rather than R, and everyone in my field reacts with surprise when I tell them I prefer Python. They're …

Either the blind person is responding to some low-energy distribution (scattered sound waves, perhaps, or past samplings of the energy distribution, i.e. memory) or the blind perso…

Wind is a local potential in this example. An intelligent wildfire would be one whose sparks can go against the wind, because it perceives more fuel in that direction. Also: my def…

I'll try: a system is intelligent if it is able to respond to low-energy deposits (information) with high-energy reactions (e.g., movement) in order to seek non-local sources of ne…

Well, to the extent that it's a scientific problem, it sure would help to have a theory. I sure don't expect that theory to enter the public consciousness anytime soon, if at all. …

I think the first true strong AI will come from research on non-equilibrium thermodynamics. We need to get down to the basics: where do entities come from that self-organize, more …

I'm already familiar with some of his work. What did you have in mind specifically? In any case, he may be one of the best in the traditional computational approach to AI, but I th…

Read the paper I linked and you'll understand why I'm not impressed.

Eventually, but strong AI just means intelligence matching or exceeding human intelligence. We already have billions of entities with human intelligence, and it is taking us a long…

We are far, far from hard AI. If anything, this article shows that we're only just now starting to ask the right questions. And that's even debatable. Plus they're very hard questi…

I'm taking a course with this book right now... and yes, I stole it at the authors' recommendation. Textbooks are too expensive and I don't want to carry it around anyway.

True that! Okay, you've convinced me to make it a long-term goal.

Nope, Psychology with a focus on complex systems, statistical physics, dynamical systems, that sort of thing. Everything from time series analyses that require hundreds of thousand…

In MATLAB, R, or numpy, it's the difference between `mean(n)` and manually looping. It's not an issue of algorithmic efficiency, it's an issue of lost productivity because they don…

Well I'm self-taught so I have to start somewhere. I'm not sure I could put together a stand-alone tool and still complete my Ph.D. program. Anyways I've found most stand-alone too…