Customer Reviews

Circuits of the Mind

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Leslie Valiant is a Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University.

He states in the Preface to this 1994 book, "The main task for the present, therefore, may be viewed as a prescientific one. What is the most promising way to proceed in order to find the intellectual structure within which at least some central questions can be formulated and reduced to problem solving? This volume suggests one avenue. It places at the center of the investigation some simple tasks of memory and learning, and advocates that these tasks be investigated by means of detailed computational models."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"The aspect of reasoning that we are particularly concerned with here is so called commensense reasoning. This is the process that humans use to cope with the mundane but complex aspects of the world in evaluating everyday situations. It is reasoning that is generally done subconsciously. It is perhaps precisely because we have no awareness of these processes that it has proved to difficult to simulate them in machines. No one has yet made a home cleaning robot that can execute its task with reasonable flexibility and commonsense." (Pg. 159)
"The major stumbling block at first seemed to be the philosophical problem raised by inductive learning, an aspect of cognition that seems impossible to evade. We believe now that computational learning theory gives an adequate view on this. It explains how it may be possible for a system to learn to cope in a world that is too complex for it to describe or understand." (Pg. 203-204)

I haven't finished this book yet, but I am very much impressed.

The author talks about this subject in a very practical way, unlike most of related books on this subject.