Melanie Mitchell
Emergent Computation and Representation
in Dynamical Systems
In recent years, a number of cognitive science researchers have
questioned the relevance of notions such as "information processing",
"computation", and "representation" for understanding cognition, and
instead propose the language of dynamical systems theory as a more
useful foundation for cognitive science. In this talk I will review
arguments on both sides of this ongoing debate, and will also review
some results on new notions of "emergent" computation in dynamical
systems. These results will be used to present a simple example in
which computation and representation -- defined in a nonstandard sense
-- are seen to be key in understanding the emergent adaptive behavior
of a particular class of dynamical systems that were evolved by a
genetic algorithm to perform specific tasks. It is hoped that the
analysis of such examples will help forge a new, unifying framework
for cognitive science, encompassing both dynamical and (albeit
nonstandard) computational approaches.
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