Non-Deterministic Determinism

As soon as I saw that the section that we had to read for this post dealt with non-determinism the Koch Snowflake immediately jumped into my consciousness. If you don't know what the Koch Snowflake is I highly suggest taking a look at it: Koch Snowflake. I won't go into a lot of detail about it, but it deals with taking something that seems very complex and non-deterministic (random), and is able to make it more deterministic. Now, with real snowflakes this isn't the case, since a snowflake is like a human and every human is different, but has the same "structure."

Now that I got that out of the way, we can go to Defays' project called Numble. On page 132, he gives a math problem, consisting of a 'target' and five 'bricks.' The idea is a lot like out initial Crypto assignment when we were given five numbers (like bricks) and were expected to find the solution (like a target). The biggest difference between the two is that in Numble, a person can use one or all of the bricks to get the target, whereas in Crypto we had to utilize all of our 'bricks' to get our 'target.' Other than that they hold the same concepts. Which is trying to model how we as (as intelligent beings) can take symbols and create a solution from the given solutions. (I use the word 'symbols' because we don't always have to use numbers, or even letters to get a solution. It could be music, where a person is able to start writing a song, and can get a solution by finishing the song, as an example).

Defays' goes on to almost structure a (neural) network on page 136 with his Pnet. (If you don't like neural network, you can just say a network, but since we're dealing with AI, I thought it to be appropriate to connect another aspect of cogsci). Structure is important with how one is to model, and if something has a weak structure (like a horribly designed bridge) it will fall apart. But, if one is able to build something complex out of a simple structure, then you can go from determinism to non-determinism, such as the Koch Snowflake.

(This all deals with a person using "top-down" or "bottom-up" processing that is. A person will seem more deterministic if they use "bottom-up" rather than "top-down" where they seem more stochastic or non-deterministic. But that's my opinion only, some may not see it this way).

-Bryan