Am I being foolhardy in considering CODIL to be a model how the brain works?

In discussing Artificial Intelligence Steven Pinker, in The Language Instinct writes (my highlighting):

Since innate similarity spaces are inherent to the logic of learning, it is not surprising that human-engineered learning systems in artificial intelli­gence are always innately designed to exploit the constraints in some domain of knowledge. A computer program intended to learn the rules of baseball is pre-programmed with the assumptions under-lying competitive sports, so that it will not interpret players' motions as a choreographed dance or a religious ritual. A program designed to learn the past tense of English verbs is given only the verb's sound as its input; a program designed to learn a verb's dictionary entry is given only its meaning. This requirement is apparent in what the designers do, though not always in what they say. Working within the assumptions of the Standard Social Science Model, the computer scientists often hype their programs as mere demos of powerful general-purpose learning systems. But because no one would be so foolhardy as to try to model the entire human mind, the researchers can take advantage of this allegedly practical limitation. They are free to hand-tailor their demo program to the kind of problem it is charged with solving, and they can be a deus ex machina funnelling just the right inputs to the program at just the right time. Which is not a criticism; that's the way learning systems have to work!

In various past and future postings on this blog I am arguing that CODIL is a model of at least some aspects of how the brain works and in making wide claims it is important that I ask myself whether I am being foolhardy, and whether I am making extravagant claims for a model general purpose learning system for the brain.

The Establishment rejected research which later got the Nobel Prize

Greg Laden has reported on 
"There can be no such creature" - Chemistry Nobel: Daniel Shechtman

At first Shechtman's results were interpreted by other experts in the field as a simple mistake that only an idiot would make. They told Shechtman that he was observing a "double crystal" and mixing up his observations. One snarky colleague gave him a school textbook on crystals implying that he should brush up on his basics. A manuscript Shechtman sent to the Journal of Applied Physics was sent back unopened.

Over time, using his personal connections to a grad school colleague and, in turn, his colleague's connections, Shechtman got his work looked at more closely by other crystal experts, who concurred that the results were both a) real and b) impossible. Finally, in 1984, a paper coauthored by Shechtman and those experts (John Cahn, Denis Gratias and his schoolmate Ilan Blech) was published in Physical Review Letters. The world of crystallography was stunned, and the single most important pillar of dogma of the science of crystals ... all crystals consist of repeating periodic patterns ... was under serious question.

There are several interesting lessons in that Odyssey of Shechtman. One, don't discount your personal and professional relationship, or the cultural aspects of scientific networks. A pure, scientific, or even "skeptical" view of Shechtman's work failed. Shechtman needed to get someone to look at his results on blind trust that there could be something there, rather than approaching it from what was known to be very well established fact. On the other hand, it must be remembered that 99.99% of the time that a scientist gets an email from someone telling them that the basic tenets of their science are wrong, it is some crazy guy who sees things in rocks. But not this time. Ultimately, this is a case of science being conservative, which is usually appropriate, but learning something new. The turnaround time between nobody knowing this thing and key scientists getting it in print was only a couple of years.

Mu comments:

This story makes you wonder how many discoveries were suppressed as "defies science" before the age of arxiv and instant distribution. Nice to see he didn't get scooped and got credit in the end.

When I hesitatingly proposed in 1967 that it should be possible to build a human-friendly "white box" information processing system (as a opposed to an inherently unfriendly "black box" conventional computer system) the idea would never have even started to get off the ground if it had not been a very supportive boss, George Stern, and his boss, John Aris (see How ICL came to axe the CODIL project). However when ICL closed and I was declared redundant for wanting to follow up the idea I got the same kind of hostility as Shechtman - and as someone who is not good at exploiting contacts (due to vicious childhood bullying)I struggled with the research, getting many rejections because "I was an idiot" until I finally had a breakdown and abandoned the idea.


It is only recently that I have dusted down the old files and it looks as if the idea could be a partial model of a symbolic language that could bridge the gap between the brain's neural net and natural language. Whether this is true a study of how my research was "suppressed" could well give clues as to how other very interesting ideas have been consigned to the garbage heap.

Putting Faster Garbage into the Westminster Box

We all live in mental, physical and social boxes – and while we may sometimes between boxes there is one box which we share and which we cannot escape – The Earth. And this box is getting very crowded and the society in which we live is looking more like a House of Cards every day – with financial crises shaking the structure and climate change weakening the foundations.

So what are our politicians doing about it.

Children are better Scientists than Adults

The Scientific American has just posted an item More than Child's Play: Ability to think Scientifically Declines as Kids Grow Up describing research on 4 and 5 year old children at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University.

In 1980 I had a problem. The university where I worked had just installed their first fully interactive computer service and I had the task of introducing 125 first year undergraduates (mainly about 18 years old) to the joys of computing. Many had never used a keyboard of any kind, some had studied computer science at school and a small number had their own home computers. Could I set an introductory piece of coursework which would not allow the budding computer geeks to show off in front of the others and scare off those who were nervous of the technology.

About a year earlier I had prepared a small demonstration package for a TV programme called Jim'll Fix It where children wrote to ask Jimmy Saville to help them to do something - and one eleven year old child had asked that a computer could help him do his homework.

I adapted and extended the package (which was written in CODIL) two include a number of additional games and data bases and the course work was:

FIXIT is a package designed for an eleven year old but it has some problems. Try it out and write a two page account of what you found.

Psychologically this worked well.  Even novices did not want to be beaten by a package for an eleven year old, while the need to write a critical account in English gave some of the budding computer whiz-kids a bit of a headache - as they had come convinced that computing was all about writing programs in BASIC.

Afterwards I gave a debriefing session to explain the significance of different "games" in the package to different sections of their future studies - and I also discussed some of the limitations of the package - especially the ones none of them had spotted. For instance FIXIT contained information on a number of British Birds and if you typed in the name of a bird it came up with some information about it. Not one of them discovered what happened if you typed in the name of a different kind of bird - i.e. a girl's name! The KINGS section asked you to type in a date and it told you the English King at the time and a number complained that they would have liked to be able to type in the name of the king and be told his dates.  Of course any eleven year old would have tried it, rather than complain, and would have found that it worked!

To me it is obvious that as we get older we organize our knowledge into mental boxes and the more we cram in the more reluctant we are to ask questions which fail to conform to our mental models. 

How ICL came to axe the CODIL project

On the 3^rd of May 1968 John Aris, who had worked on Leo Computers, was then Manager of Applied Systems in English Electric Computers, and later Director of the National Computer Centre wrote: about a new research project called DORIS (later renamed CODIL):

DORIS, a 'Data ORiented Information System', is an original and radically new; approach to the systems/programming of computers, devised by Dr. C. Reynolds of this Department. It involves holding a large proportion of the decision-making logic, normally built into user programs, as part of the data files, and analyzing it not with a variety of special applications programs, but with one general purpose decision making routine. If this proves viable it could result in the virtual demise of the conventional application program in many fields, replacing it by the said general purpose routine and groups of calculation routines. Its data structure, being closer to the ordinary modes of human thought than computer files generally are, could allow the ultimate user far greater freedom to use the computer as an information handler in a familiar way, and without the need for expensive commercial programmers. This would, among other advantages, ease the implementation of management information systems. A further important consequence could be a new approach to CPU design.

Review: The Origin of Our Species – by Chris Stringer

As a young man I was very interested in the caves of Devon, and the early work of the Victorian archaeologist William Pengelly in Kent's Cavern, Devon, so I was delighted to learn that human bones from this cave have now been shown to be about 40,000 years old and hence among the oldest homo remains found in Europe. Fifty years later my interests in human-computer communication have widened in an attempt to understand the evolution of human-human communication and I needed a crash course on what is currently known on the subject.

Voices of the Deep - Marine mammals and the cost of language

I have just seen the BBC film Voices of the Deep, which is part of the BBC Ocean Giants series currently available on I-player. and the shoot of, for example, the different ways in which individual pods of orcas (killer whales) catch their prey clearly shows a high degree of culture. Other recent items I have seen on line include research into Dolphin language  and the following video on Youtube which showed how orcas could disable and kill the Great White Shark

Escaping from the Box – The Dartington Experience

Some reflection following the Dartington Hall School reunion, 2^nd-4^th September, 2011

Dartington Hall School was one of the most progressive schools anywhere in England and between 1952 and 1956 I found myself way outside the conventional educational “box” as a pupil there. At the reunion a few days ago there was much discussion about old times and also the effect that going to such an unusual school had on one's career. I was one of the pupils that Bill Curry (the headmaster at the time) rescued from the evils of conventional education In discussions I said I would write something of my experiences - and I am doing so here because the observations are very relevant to the way we all become trapped by the mental, physical and social boxes we grow up in.