Symbolic Debate in AI versus Connectionist - Competing or Complementar Essay

Symbolic Debate in AI versus Connectionist - Competing or Complementary - Essay Example If the aim of human-oriented Artificial Intelligence is to develop common sense, an extreme example of the purely symbolic approach is to be seen in the Cyc project. Here, common-sense rules inferred from the everyday world are hard-coded into the system such that it will be able to handle any type of situation. And it is in this â€Å"extremely symbolic† approach that the worst failures of that approach will probably be seen: forget one fact, and the system crashes, with nothing to lean back on.On the other hand, best-suited to the connectionist approach are models of the brain at the micro-level. The brain is, after all, a neural network—literally. The problem here is that we get a working model, but with a very little description of what is actually going on inside, and the question begs to be asked (by connectionists, of course): why model it if it cannot be explained?The natural thought is that there must be some way the two systems can â€Å"co-operate.† Co nsider an interesting problem, one that may seem far-fetched but which is good enough to serve as an example: that of nonsense translation, as in â€Å"English French German Suite,† quoted in Gà ¶del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas Hofstadter, 1979, page 366). Here, a translation into German by Robert Scott of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky is presented. The English stanza’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves†¦All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe.†Gets translated into the German asâ€Å"Es Brillig war. Die schlichten Toven†¦Und aller-mà ¼msige BurggovenDie Mà ¶hmen Rà ¤th’ ausgraben.†Consider â€Å"outgrabe†: how would one â€Å"translate† it into German? It turns out that â€Å"out† is â€Å"aus† in German, and â€Å"grab† sounds perfectly German; add to that the common German â€Å"-en† suffix and one gets â€Å"ausgraben.† Similar principles apply to the translation of all the nonsense words here.