You're just a bit clever, aren't you FF?
Well, no. I'm sortuva one act play. I'm familiar with some things because of school, work, interest, or unplanned experience. Most things I'm pretty boneheaded about.
I notice you also talked about AI (Artificial Intelligence) programming elsewhere. Have you ever tried getting computers to handle Natural Language or basic perceptual processing?
Never done the NLP thing, though I have some interest and have done a very little reading. I'm not sure what you mean by "basic perceptual processing." My master's thesis was on neural nets and that was mildly interesting. I was interested in having evolving systems of neural nets (at the time, there weren't more than 1 or two papers on the subject...now there are hundreds). Unfortunately, my thesis director didn't think that was a very interesting subject and so I left off at a silly and very useless tool for experiments. I did do some experiments on my own with evolving systems of competing NNs, where I tried to see if I could observe certain naturally occurring equations (volterra's), but I had no luck in that (and a job offer that took me from away from that interest). I suppose it's just as well. AI doesn't seem to be making many advances. Still, I often look back and wonder how the heck I got to where I am from where I was.
One of my profs was talking a while back and noted that orginally we (computer scientists) thought logic was going to be very difficult to manage, while pattern recognition would be a snap. It's turned out exactly the opposite is true. Logic is very trivial (well, by comparison). It's the pattern matching that's complicated. (In my mind, logic is a special case of pattern matching, but I follow his argument.) I suspect it's mostly fortuitous that our brains can handle things like mathematics in general and logic in particular. (We don't like to think logically - we like to think analogically.) I agree with him that it's the distinguishing things we can eat from things that can eat us where the interesting stuff lies.
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