[Heartlogic-dev] RE: FW: Research in emotional AI

[Josh White]

Here's the (only moderately relevant) part of a recent email thread:

> > [Josh P]
> > > Personally, I never liked neural-nets.  Why?  Because if a
> > > neural-net can learn something then why not just extract the 
> > > learned mathematical formula into a more standard form?  Of 
> > > course this doesn't work if you keep asking the neural-net to 
> > > learn different things, but why do you need to be in a 
> > > constant state of re-modelling to simulate emotion? Maybe 
> > > that's what Mr. Wilson means by "general purpose behavior"?
> [Josh W]
> > I see what you mean about neural nets. I've always seen them as 
> > valuable for two reasons:
> > 
> > 1) they seem to be a closer model to the way our brains work than 
> > math/logic methods, thus intuitively seem like a better system for 
> > emotion/human simulation
[Josh P]
> Yah, but it's so hopelessly low-level.  I mean, can you 
> expect more accurate simulations by modelling things at the 
> protein level instead of at the neuron level?
> 
> > 2) they offer a horsepower-centric (ie, just use bigger computers,
not 
> > smarter people)  way to discover previously unknown math/logic 
> > methods. I'm always looking for ways to make bigger computers more 
> > useful to people, and neural nets seem to offer good opportunities 
> > there.
> 
> My opinion is that _people_ need to find a simple, elegant, 
> and intuitive way to model emotions.  Otherwise you're giving 
> that job to the neural-net.  I just can't believe that a 
> neural-net is going to be as insightful as the 10-20 Ph.D. 
> research people working full-time on the problem.
> 
> Think of it this way, have you heard of any neural-net which 
> has gotten a Ph.D.?