The Society Of Mind {ReadingNotes}

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

See also

• WatchingNotes#TheSocietyOfMind
  • http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-868j-the-society-of-mind-spring-2007/
• http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/
• The Society of Mind & The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky, MIT 2009
• Wikipedia:Society of Mind
• Cognition#OptimizableModelPerPage
• The Architecture of the Mind by Peter Carruthers, Oxford University Press 2006
• Punch and Judy, to their audience by Theodore Melnechuk
• own TX incomplete work on MAS (slides) at UTC
  • Cloud:Work/Co-Evolution/__ Fichiers a classer/rapport TX/
• Wikipedia:K-line (artificial intelligence)
  • see Seedea:Oimp/Visualantwiki
• Society of Mind Margin Notes by Michael Dawson
• reviews
  • Minsky's Society of Mind, EMCParadigm Publishing
  • Examining the Society of Mind by Push Singh, 2003
• http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/Agents
• http://pedia.media.mit.edu/Society_of_Mind
• Marvin Minsky by Roberto Olivares
• The wisdom of crowds in one mind: How individuals can simulate the knowledge of diverse societies to reach better decisions by H. Rauhut and J. Lorenz, Journal of Mathematical Psychology 2010

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.

Categories

• Psychology

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