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Parallel reasoning in structured connectionist networks: Signatures versus temporal synchrony

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Commentary onShastriL. and AjjanagaddeV. (1993) From simple associations to systematic reasoning: A connectionist representation of rules, variables, and dynamic bindings using temporal synchrony. BBS 16:417–494.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

Trent E. Lange  and
Michael G. Dyer
Trent E. Lange
Affiliation:
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024. [email protected]; [email protected]
Michael G. Dyer
Affiliation:
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024. [email protected]; [email protected]
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Shastri & Ajjanagadde (1993) (S&A) argue convincingly that both structured connectionist networks and parallel dynamic inferencing are necessary for reflexive reasoning - a kind of inferencing and reasoning that occurs rapidly, spontaneously, and without conscious effort, and which seems necessary for everyday tasks such as natural language understanding. As S&A describe, reflexive reasoning requires a solution to the dynamic binding problem, that is, how to encode systematic and abstract knowledge and instantiate it in specific situations to draw appropriate inferences. Although symbolic artificial intelligence systems trivially solve the dynamic binding problem using computers' registers and pointers, it has remained a difficult problem for connectionist systems (see Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988). S&A's temporal synchrony solution to the dynamic binding problem using synchronous firing of argument units and the entities that are bound to them illustrates one way in which connectionist networks can do thisusing a constrained but important class of long-term knowledge rules. Their structured connectionist solution allows dynamic inferencing to proceed in parallel and therefore has a number of advantages for reflexive reasoning over most other connectionist and symbolic systems.

Type
Continuing Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 1996 , pp. 328 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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