Dear Subscribers,
I have recently completed a draft of a new book and I am looking for a few
people who would be willing to read at least part of it and give me
comments. I will, of course, acknowledge all such help in the book. Here is
the blurb:
UNIFYING COMPUTING AND COGNITION: THE ICMAUS THEORY AND ITS APPLICATIONS
The 'ICMAUS' theory (also known as the 'SP' theory) is a theory of
information processing in *any* kind of system, either natural or
artificial. It is Turing-equivalent in the sense that it can model the
operation of a universal Turing machine but it has much more to say about
the nature of 'intelligence' than the UTM or equivalent models such as Lamda
Calculus or Post's Canonical System. It also provides a radically new
perspective on the nature of mathematics and logic.
The ICMAUS theory is built on twin foundations:
* A long tradition in psychology and neuroscience -- developed by Fred
Attneave, Horace Barlow and others -- that many aspects of perception,
cognition, and the workings of brains and nervous systems, may be understood
as information compression (IC).
* A quasi-independent body of research -- pioneered by Ray Solomonoff and
others -- exploring the very close relation that exists amongst IC,
inductive inference and probabilistic reasoning.
The theory proposes that *all* kinds of information processing may be
understood in terms of IC by the matching and unification of patterns. A key
idea in the theory is a concept of 'multiple alignment' which is similar to
that concept in bioinformatics but with important differences.
These ideas have been realised in the form of computer models that provide a
means of testing the ideas and demonstrating how they can be applied to such
things as the parsing and production of natural language, unsupervised
learning, probabilistic 'deduction', abduction and nonmonotonic reasoning,
causal reasoning, fuzzy pattern recognition, best-match and semantic
information retrieval, representation and processing of ontologies, medical
diagnosis, finding a route between two places, solving geometric analogy
problems, modelling structures and processes in mathematics and logic, and
more.
The book also includes a chapter describing how key concepts in the ICMAUS
theory may be mapped on to structures and processes in the brain and another
chapter describing how the theory relates to some current thinking in
cognitive psychology.
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If you would be willing to read at least some of the book and give me
comments, please get in touch. I can provide a CD with the whole book in PDF
format with bookmarks and hyperlinks. Or it can be downloaded from
www.cognitionresearch.org.uk/sp.htm.
With thanks in anticipation,
Gerry Wolff
Web: www.cognitionresearch.org.uk.
Email: jgw AT cognitionresearch DOT org DOT uk.
Telephone: +44 (0)1248 712962.
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