ReadingNotes

The Society Of Mind

The Society Of Mind by Marvin Minsky - ISBN 0671607405 - Simon & Schuster 1988

Motivation

Classical book by a founder of artificial intelligence. Watched the associated MIT class before and also visited CSAIL.

Pre-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain before having read the book.

Reading

1 Prologue
- defining agents and agencies as constituents of the distributed mind
Chapter 14.5 Brainstorming
- "However, when you are really stuck, you might as well tried wilder ways to find new ideas." (p143) similar principal to Seedea:Seedea/BackEnd and generalized Wikipedia:Simulated annealing
  - also discussed with Raphael regarding creativity, Saint-Maur flat July 2010
several mentions of Piaget
mention of Thomas Kuhn, see TheStructureOfScientificRevolutions
the quote of Ernst Hans Gombrich regarding art can also be seen as an evolution of point of view, nearly an application of TreeOfKnowledge to art (see also Art)
quoting Jakob von Uexkull
Hofstadter on creativity
definitions of concepts linking language, memory and specific cognitive usages (see the glossary)
- pronomes, close to a deictic function but from an agent perspective, temporary (see also K-lines)
- polynemes, permanent
- isonomes, a more functional role over agencies
- paranomes, parallely activated pronomes
- superpolynemes, superisonomes, superpronomes
30 Mental Models

Overall remarks and questions

if a society of mind is a set of interacting agents loosely coupled the ability to cooperate (or refuse to do so) is also required to have a proper understanding without having to rely on emergence
- thus on collaboration, see also the last chapters of TreeOfKnowledge
important use of dialogues to question a presented viewpoint
"society" can seen as an alternative to network with its interacting nodes, see also Cognition#HistoryOfDominantCognitiveModels for a more generalized view on popular models
- e.g. society of
  - "agents", "minds", "ideas", "muscles, bones, and joints", "more", "mental agencies", "nearness relations between places", "different ways to learn", "many smaller mechanisms", "different kinds of processes"
- see also the glossary
after about half of the book more and more terms being defined makes the comprehension harder
- micronemes/pronomes/polynemes/isonomes/frames/trans-frames
- what might seems for the reader like vague redefinitions is most likely for the author a fruitful and practical conceptual framework despite the cost of it not being broadly shared and used
is there a software applications of the individual ideas and the overarching principle?
- beside MAS in general?
- http://alexpetrov.com/proj/dual/ page created in 1999 and not updated since 2005 as of December 2010
- http://www.quora.com/What-software-was-inspired-by-Marvin-Minskys-Society-of-Mind

Synthesis

So in the end, it was about X and was based on Y.

Critics

Point A, B and C are debatable because of e, f and j.

Vocabulary

(:new_vocabulary_start:) new_word (:new_vocabulary_end:)

Post-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain after having read the book. Link it to the pre-reading model and align the two to help easy comparison.

Fabien Benetou's PIM