Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.speech,sci.cognitive,sci.lang,soc.history.science
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From: ba672@lafn.org (Arthur T. Murray)
Subject: Why Mentifex AI?  (Was: tiring of mentifex)
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Message-ID: <1996Dec26.182406.22429@lafn.org>
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Reply-To: ba672@lafn.org (Arthur T. Murray)
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References: <19961225155800.KAA01730@ladder01.news.aol.com>  
Date: Thu, 26 Dec 1996 18:24:06 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai:43005 comp.speech:11845 sci.cognitive:14320 sci.lang:66749


From the gentlemanly article of "Bear" I3uddha <i3uddha@aol.com>:

> Arthur T. Murray always writes:

  /^^^^^^^^^^^\ Top-down Overview; Details on WWW /^^^^^^^^^^^\
 /visual memory\           ________   semantic   /  auditory   \
|      /--------|-------\ / syntax \  memory    |episodic memory|
|      |  recog-|nition | \________/<-----------|-------------\ |
|   ___|___     |       |    |flush-vector      |    _______  | |
|  /image  \    |    ___V____V___  word-fetch   |   /stored \ | |
| / percept \<--|-->/ conceptual \--------------|->/ phonemes\| |
| \ engrams /   |   \ mini-grids / for thinking |  \ of words/  |
|  \_______/    |    \__________/  in language  |   \_______/   |

> Three questions:
> 1. What is it?
> 2. What are you doing with it?
> 3. What are we supposed to do with it?

And from Prof. Dana Nau <nau@cs.umd.edu> of University of Maryland:
> Unfortunately, comp.ai often seems to attract people with offbeat
> ideas that most serious AI researchers would consider implausible.

Considering also the contributions of John Nagle <nagle@netcom.com>:
>     Game AI is almost entirely non-linguistic, which is good;
> top-down AI, as a field, is sort of stuck, so we may as well
> push bottom-up AI upwards for a while.

1.  It is unfortunately many things to many people.  To those who
are already versed in Chomskyan linguistics it is a revelation of
how to implant the linguistic superstructure within a brain-mind.
To the unversed it is a puzzlement, but an invitation to explore.

2.  Every day thousands of new arrivals connect to the burgeoning
Internet and find their way to these newsgroups where ideas rule.
The Mentifex mind-diagram with URL proposes such novel ideas that
its ratio of archived novel URL content to signal+/-noise is high
and -- if it is an AI breakthrough -- its outcome is Singularity.

3.  You who are already most tolerant of repetitious memes should
gravely consider that you are wielding an enormous power before a
Singularity and before the millennium 2000 to influence how memes
of AI will propagate, clash, and succeed or die out in the arena:
If you hold a position of authority, order a Mentifex evaluation.
If you publish hardcopy AI opera, include the diagram or the URL.
If you care about ideas or history or evolution then AUDE SAPERE!
