The Failure of Sub-Symbolic AI
- Though connectionist systems have been modelled since before the Turing
test was developed, they were not very popular until the late 80s.
- In 1986, the PDP books were published and there was a surge in
interest in connectionist systems.
- Aside- I use neural nets to refer to models based on neurons, where
connectionist systems are just inspired by neurons. A feedforward
net is connectionist, not a neural net.-
- The connectionist work has been remarkably successful.
- There are a host of different connectionist algorithms,
- they are used in industrial applications,
- the understanding of them has grown rapidly.
- The parallel nature of them also gives us hope of building
really powerful parallel computers well beyond the power that
a serial machine could have.
- They also give us hope of grounding our symbols.
- The problem is that most work is on learning simple functions.
- Currently, there is no sound way of combining them to build
larger systems.