On 30/04/07, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Best example I can think of is William Calvin saying something like:
"the conscious mind is clearly designed to deal with problematic decisions,
where existing solutions won't work. The smartest mind is the one that can
find the correct answer to those problems." Well, that's a definite
self-contradiction. There is no correct answer to problematic decisions,
only a calculated gamble.
When dealing with probabilities there may be no single correct answer, but a
variety of possible answers with probabilistic weightings assigned to them
(the calculated gamble). For example, when you have a robot navigating
around using its senses the raw sense data is always subject to some degree
of noise or quantisation. Over time the exact same sensory input could
correspond to multiple possible positions of the robot, but some will be
more probable than others. The uncertainty in sensing and the movement of
the robot can be modelled using mathematical curves called probability
density functions. Much of the time the functions used to represent the
uncertainty are gaussian ("normal") distributions, although this isn't
always the case.
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