Introduction to Connectionist Modelling of Cognitive Processes Review

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(More customer reviews)for 2 years i have been searching for textbooks on artificial intelligence that contain actual skills and techniques you can use here and now. so many books on artificial intelligence seem to be all sizzle and no steak. this book is all steak.
finally i have found a book that says "this is what we know how to do. this is how it works. this is how YOU do it." the things that can be done with the information in this book are quite astonishing.
although this book is exclusively about the design and funcion of connectionist neural networks, (rather than the construction of them), the simulator it supplies is quite frankly exellent.
the book covers many useful topics including the basics of facial recognition, voice recognition, language acquisition, and prototype extraction, as well as delving into various other human cognitive process simulations such as episodal memory formation.
i think so highly of this book that i am going to purchase a second copy in the near future, just in case something happens to the first one (which is already falling apart from the amount of use its been getting).
my future purchases for artificial intelligence books will not be made from the artificial intelligence category, but rather, cognitive science, computational nueroscience, and anything written by the authors of this book (Peter McLeod, Kim Plunkett & Edmund T. Rolls).

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Connectionism is a way of modeling how the brain uses streams of sensory inputs to understand the world and produce behavior, based on cognitive processes which actually occur. This book describes the principles, and their application to explaining how the brain produces speech, forms memories and recognizes faces, how intellect develops, and how it deteriorates after brain damage. The models range from some well-known classics to others at the frontiers of current research. Also included is a disk with the software for running tlearn, a user-friendly simulator for connectionist modeling of cognitive processes, which will run on either PCs or Macs. Written by leading researchers in their field, this first up-to-date textbook on connectionist modeling, will provide an essential and accessible introduction to the field.

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Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book contains some thoughtful reasons for believing that many evolutionary psychologists overestimate how much information about the human mind is encoded in genes. However, it is mixed in with some highly technical developmental neurobiology that only a few specialists are likely to find interesting.
For nonspecialists, David Buller's book Adapting Minds says similar things about innateness in a style that is more suited for laymen.

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Rethinking Innateness asks the question, "What does it really mean to say that a behavior is innate?" The authors describe a new framework in which interactions, occurring at all levels, give rise to emergent forms and behaviors. These outcomes often may be highly constrained and universal, yet are not themselves directly contained in the genes in any domain-specific way.One of the key contributions of Rethinking Innateness is a taxonomy of ways in which a behavior can be innate. These include constraints at the level of representation, architecture, and timing; typically, behaviors arise through the interaction of constraints at several of these levels.The ideas are explored through dynamic models inspired by a new kind of "developmental connectionism," a marriage of connectionist models and developmental neurobiology, forming a new theoretical framework for the study of behavioral development. While relying heavily on the conceptual and computational tools provided by connectionism, Rethinking Innateness also identifies ways in which these tools need to be enriched by closer attention to biology.

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Game Theory Evolving: A Problem-Centered Introduction to Modeling Strategic Interaction (Second Edition) Review

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(More customer reviews)Herb Gintis is an economist with a strong interest in the assumptions we make about human rationality in our social, political, and economic theories. He has produced a remarkable and deceptively innovative text that could productively be used in a broad range of fields.
The topic of game theory is interesting to many people because it describes interaction between competitors, presumably helping us pick the best strategy if the circumstances are well enough understood. We might wonder whether the circumstances are well enough understood in daily life to apply the methods of game theory to our own choices, since it usually to assume that we are rational competitors trying to maximize our own gain.
Game Theory Evolving addresses this fascinating question not from a theoretical perspective so much as giving the reader the tools for investigating it themselves in two distinct but complementary ways.
First, it provides practical problem-oriented chapters for learning the principles and thinking in terms of game theoretic methods. The problems are not the usual textbook "who cares, anyway ?" type. Rather they are fun and interesting to solve and often lead to direct insights into real situations.
Second, it extends game theory into the realm of evolutionary thinking, so we not only understand strategic action but we get some deeper insight into how our historical needs shaped our behavior and even our thought processes. Game theory may help explain how we learned to cooperate and why under some conditions we tend to punish cheaters and treat people fairly even though it provides no apparent advantage to us.
Disguised as a lowly academic textbook, Game Theory Evolving is actually a basic toolkit, a passport into the remarkable modern study of evolutionary thinking about human nature, through a practical grounding in the mathematical techniques that have the potential to join our understanding of social sciences and biology.

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