Re: academic freedom (The Mentifex Manifesto)

[jfox@xxxxxxxxxx (Jeff Fox)]

Dear MISC readers:

Robert Jay Brown wrote:

>Go back to Atlantis where you cam from!  PS Atlantis is most likely
>know to Biblical scholars as Sodom, which was flooded by the Dead Sea
>after the destruction chronicled in Genesis.  Your New Age tripe is
>not welcome on this list!
>
>-- 
>--------  "And there came a writing to him from Elijah"  [2Ch 21:12]  --------
>Robert Jay Brown III  rj@eli.wariat.org  http://eli.wariat.org  1 847 705-0424
>Elijah Laboratories Inc.;  37 South Greenwood Avenue;  Palatine, IL 60067-6328
>-----  M o d e l i n g   t h e   M e t h o d s   o f   t h e   M i n d  ------

I do not consider the MISC mail list a religious forum and would 
prefer to not see it head in that direction.

I welcome posts about the mentifex project in MISC.  I think there is more
than one way to approach modeling the mind.  I will admit that the recent
posts contained very little factual information about the project design
or status and did have a promotional new age flavor.

I am interested in learning more about mentifex but I was unable to get
to either of the web sites listed last month in MISC.

I have seen the mind.rexx implementation of some of the mentifex
project and I have wondered if it would not be more productive to
write a REXX compiler for F21 than to port the program to Forth 
directly. (I also liked the REXX LINDA)

F21 is optimized for logic, and distributed expert systems.  It might
be the ideal platform for a program that performs autonomous reasoning
like mentifex.  Although my understanding of the program is limited I
think the natural parallelism could be well exploited in an F21 system.

Mentifex is not exactly what I have planned for F21, but I would like
to encourage those interested in the details to discuss the concepts
and porting problems of this approach to AI.

If other people have strong opinions about AI they are welcome to
discuss the merits of their own approaches or the problems they
see in other approaches.  

I would characterize mentifex as a combination of neural nets and
expert systems in that many concepts and linguist translation is
hard coded in the program and what is not is simply pattern matching
and association.  Mind.rexx has demonstrated that this approach
produces a program that "models methods of the mind."  I don't think
that anyone has found an all encompassing solution, or ported their
approach most efficiently to MISC hardware.

F21 was not designed to crunch large floating point arrays, so many
people have missed the value of its parallelism.  I have been told
that the only value of parallelism is in the cost is no factor
high end grand challange machines.  I like to point to the industry
standard approach to expert systems and show the orders of magnitude
improvement you can get when you compile to Forth on a Forth machine.
Combined with the orders of magnitude improvement in price by providing
highly integrated but mininal hardware and you get very impressive
price performance ratios.

I have written small programs that combine expert rules with neural
nets and done real time voice and image recognition systems on
very modest hardware.  I am very interested in seeing the results
of speeding up the hardware by many orders of magnitude.

I know F21 is well designed as a platform for the programs I have
written, and I think it is an ideal platform for mentifex as well.

I don't think that the recent releases about mentifex included
much useful information, and I don't think mentifex resembles
industry standard approaches to AI, but I do want to know about
developments in this approach.

If people have alternatives that they feel map well to MISC then
I would be interested in the details.

I enjoy a good metaphysical discussion of the implications of
porting a program like mentifex to F21, but I think a more detailed
and technical description of the program is needed first.

The MISC mail list has been open to many types of discussions: 
hardware theory, documentation, kit details, future hardware
design tradeoffs, software tricks, etc.  I think there is room
for people to promote discussions of the kind of software they
would like to see ported to MISC chips.

MISC is exploring new concepts in both hardware and software.  I
am interested in new ideas.  I have little interest in hearing
"MISC is of no use to me because I cannot do everything exactly
the same way I do it now." 

I see no problem with information about mentifex being posted here
but I would like to see more details and less hype.

Jeff Fox