From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Sat Jan 26 2002 - 15:07:32 MST
> Ben Goertzel wrote:
> > There is a distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge that
> > has to be made here. N items in memory have 2^N combinations, and so
> > there *is* exponential increase of knowledge implicit in linear
> > increase in memory.
>
> > However, when knowledge is reprsented only implicitly, it takes
> > processing time to sort it out, so one has a time-space tradeoff.
>
> I don't think it is that clear cut. It is apparent that the brain does
> _NOT_ consult all available abstractions for each time step, even though
> it, in theory, could. Rather it seems to use something akin to a sifting
> method that quickly prunes the number of combinations it has to try to
> far less than the full search space. Furthermore, It appears that the
> learning process improves the efficiency of the pruning without severly
> cripling its generality. =
Of course, my statement was overly simplistic, as I stated explicitly...
there seemed to be no more accurate statement with an equal concision...
But intelligent pruning of the combination space requires not only good
heuristics, but also abstract background knowledge about which combinations
of which kinds of information tend to be useful in which contexts....
And this background knowledge requires memory... though not as much as
storing all the combinations explicitly, still a lot...
-- Ben G
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