Apprentices of Wonder: Inside the Neural Network Revolution (Paperback)

~ William F. Allman (Author) "The mind has been trying to understand itself for centuries..." (more)
Key Phrases: student neural net, multilayered nets, connectionist movement, Terry Sejnowski, Patricia Churchland, San Diego (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the traditional view, all thinking involves the manipulation of symbols. But according to the new "connectionist" theory of mind, human thought arises from the brain's architecture and is generated by the complex interactions of billions of neurons interlinked in neural nets. These vast brain cell networks seemingly possess the ability to change their own connections; experience (not genes) is the engineer that effects the rewiring. Allman, a freelance journalist, offers an exciting, remarkably lucid tour through the labyrinth of this emerging science. Aided by everyday examples and diagrams that lighten the presentation, he ponders how we acquire language and store memories, and discusses machines capable of reading or grasping patterns. He also looks at blueprints for optical computers, in which light is the current that shuttles information.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

In the vein of The Soul of a New Machine, a dramatic chronicle of a new revolution in brain-mind science comes this accessible book on the scientists who are creating startling new theories of how the mind works as the forge a new kind of artificial intelligence called neural networks--or, the first thinking machines

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (August 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553349465
• ISBN-13: 978-0553349467
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,028,341 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars An accountant who plays jazz for a hobby??, September 30, 2005

By	Yu Zhang - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've just finished reading the book "Apprentices of wonder - Inside the Neural Network Revolution", by William F. Allman. It was an old book, published in 1989. This book tells us stories about those pioneers in neural network research and development. The most interesting part of the book is about the fight between symbolic AI and connectionism AI. In the end, the author concluded that neither side won and the future of AI could be some form of the combination of these two. I totally agree with the author on this.

In the book, in order to show that day-to-day human reasoning is not symbolic (totally rely on logic rules), the author gave us a very interesting study by psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky.

In this study, subjects were given a short description of a person and then asked to guess which professions and hobbies the person was most likely to have. Here we have:

Russ is 34 years old. He is intelligent, but unimaginative, compulsive, and generally lifeless. In school, he was strong in mathematics but weak in social studies and humanities.

Please rank in oder the following statements by their probability, using 1 for the most probable and 8 for the least probable.

<ul>
<li> Russ is a physician who plays poker for a hobby.
<li> Russ is an architect.
<li> Russ is an accountant.
<li> Russ plays jazz for a hobby.
<li> Russ surfs for a hobby.
<li> Russ is a writer.
<li> Russ is an accountant who plays jazz for a hobby.
<li> Russ climbs mountains for a hobby.
</ul>

The results of the study? Most people, quite reasonably, ranked "Russ is an accountant" as most probable. They also ranked "Russ plays jazz for a hobby" as very unlikely. However, most people also said the probability that "Russ is an accountant who plays jazz for a hobby" is higher than the probability that "Russ plays jazz for a hobby." But this violates the laws of probability! It is impossible for a statement combining two unrelated (even related - yuz) elements to be more probable than either element alone. The author claimed that even those students trained in probability and decision science made the same mistake!

The current probability theory defines that P(AB)=P(A)P(B|A)=P(B)P(A|B), since P(X) is never bigger than 1, P(AB) will never be bigger than P(A) or P(B).

This is really interesting, we are not only having born optical illusions, we also have born mental illusions! This explained a lot about my stupid decisions made in the past:-) What is truly wrong?? Our common-sense neural network or the symbolic probability theory?