On Oct 1, 2008, at 1:41 AM, Rob Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 12:33 AM, Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> This all sounds very, you know, intriguing, like the blurb on the
>> dustjacket of a fantasy novel. But you never actually tell us what
>> you are talking about, Rob. You just keep making indirect allusions
>> to deep "problems" and hidden "pitfalls" and your preferences for a
>> more "geometric" approach to... well, to something, though Im still
>> not sure what exactly. And when we challenge you to come out and
>> actually say something, as Chris did, you instantly retreat into a
>> huffy "lets not argue about trifles" stance. One is inevitably led
>> to guess that you don't actually have anything substantive to say.
>> All you do is stand at the edge of the work site and make sniffy
>> noises about how the foundations are in the wrong place. As one of
>> the workers, I herby invite you to put on a hard hat and actually
>> try doing something. Then we might be willing to take some notice.
>> But until you do, your suggestions to 'consider a more fundamental
>> topology' will fall on - well, not deaf, but closed - ears. Pat,
>
> I know your ears are closed Pat. It is only natural. If you regard
> yourself principally as an engineer working with logic, then none of
> it will make any sense to you. It is pointless to try. (01)
Condescension aside, you miss Pat's point. You are (mis)reading his
"closed ears" metaphor to (mis)characterize him as unable/unwilling to
hear. To the contrary, as is transparently clear to everyone who read
Pat's message, he in fact has read your posts quite carefully and has
reached a point where it seems clear to him that you have nothing
substantive to say. Hence, until you "actually try doing something"
-- e.g., build a reasoner or a natural language processor based on
your ideas, or develop a systematic thesis that fleshes out your
evocative slogans -- no one who is actually doing real work in AI or
ontological engineering is going to pay you any mind. (02)
> I'm not posting for you, but for others who might glimpse problems
> in the formalism they are working with.
>
> As I said, if you don't see the problems, my solutions certainly
> won't interest you. (03)
You have yet to identify a single problem. Can you articulate one? (04)
> I referenced once before here Giuseppe Vitiello's lecture on a basis
> for concepts in the dynamics of many-body systems. Perhaps it bears
> repeating:
>
> http://www.archive.org/details/Redwood_Center_2007_01_23_Giuseppe_Vitiello (05)
That you think this work has any direct bearing on AI/OE suggests to
me that perhaps you are under a misimpression of the subject matter of
these disciplines. (06)
> Remember how holograms came up also in our Ontolog discussion. It's
> a wonderfully close parallel. It turns out a guy named Tony Plate
> has a formalism he calls HRR, or Holographic Reduced Representation.
> That was what inspired VSA's (due to Ross Gayler.)
>
> VSA's are especially good. They seem to present (compositional)
> representation as a vector product in much the way I've been
> advocating. (07)
You do recognize that VSAs are a move in the connectionist AI
paradigm, which of course has many problems and challenges of its own,
right? And that connectionism itself, while a promising approach,
hasn't exactly delivered the goods either, right? And that it's not
clearly even a competitor to the logicist paradigm? You might find
the paper "Is the connectionist-logicist clash one of AI's wonderful
red herrings?" by Selmer Bringsjord worth reading in this regard: (08)
http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/connectionist_logicist_clash.pdf (09)
> From my point of view all we need to do is mix the idea of a vector
> product giving a compositional character (VSA's), with example/usage-
> based ideas already current in linguistics. (010)
Sounds good. Care to sketch how that might be done? Just a hint? (011)
-chris (012)
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