Found a really interesting article about Noam Chomsky's views on AI. It includes an interview with him as well.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/?single_page=true

At one point he uses ants to illustrate a point:

"So if you want to study, say, the neurology of an ant, you ask what does the ant do? It turns out the ants do pretty complicated things, like path integration, for example."
 

He also goes into some examples of the way we process language. He points out that we process based on computational "distances" not linear distance. One of the examples he used is the sentence:

"Instinctively eagles that fly swim."

When trying to make sense of this string of words we attempt to associate "Instinctively" with the word "swim", even though the word "fly" is linearly closer to it.

This just struck me as interesting in light of the discussions we have been having on distance search algorithms.

posted by Richard Cross
(I noticed that if I didn't know someones username, I would have no idea who they were in class)

Richard wrote the first post in this sequence early this month. Chomsky is arguing against Peter Norvig, the person whose video we watched earlier this year on spelling correction. Norvig argues for the value of statistical methods in AI; Chomsky says they won't yield real insight about how intelligence works. Chomsky made his point in a talk he gave at an MIT event earlier this year. Norvig thought it important enough to respond.  Here is Richard's link to an interview with Chomsky that occurred after the Norvig response, which includes a link to Chomsky's original talk.

I think it would be worthwhile to examine this issue next Saturday, our last meeting. A nice way to do it would be to have people takes the two sides. Is anyone willing to argue the Chomsky side? Is anyone willing to argue the Norvig side?  Even though this isn't an assignment I'd like to encourage you to volunteer. As an added incentive, volunteering will be worth extra credit toward the final grade in the class.