Variable Binding
- One of the common complaints about connectionist systems is
that they can't do variable binding (e.g. Fodor, Pinker).
- The variable binding problem also goes under the name
of the binding problem and the moving brushes problem.
- As Palm notes, variable binding is really a host of problems
rolled into one.
- Here's a list that is probably neither exclusive or
exhaustive.
- Compositional concept problem (red square). There are
a range of concepts that are compositional. For storage
efficiency and learnability, the concept needs to be
formed of the primitives. So, we can imagine that
humans store 10 shapes and 10 colours, but it would be
odd to store the 100 colour shape pairs.
- Location-object problem (where is the square)
- Multiple-object problem (there are two squares)
- Type token problem (Lassie, collie)
- Subcategorisation hierarchy problem (Lassie, collie,
dog, animal...)
- Parts whole problem (car, tires)
- Rule application problem
- To have a neural-based cognitive architecture, we need
to solve the Variable Binding problem.
