Related papers: Representation in Dynamical Systems
Artificial computing machinery transforms representations through an objective process, to be interpreted subjectively by humans, so the machine and the interpreter are different entities, but in the putative natural computing both…
The relationship between brains and computers is often taken to be merely metaphorical. However, genuine computational systems can be implemented in virtually any media; thus, one can take seriously the view that brains literally compute.…
Many real-world dynamic systems, both natural and artificial, are understood to be performing computations. For artificial dynamic systems, explicitly designed to perform computation - such as digital computers - by construction, we can…
In this work we consider a dynamic system consisting of a damped harmonic oscillator and we formalize a Turing Machine whose definition in terms of states, alphabet and transition rules, can be considered equivalent to that of the…
Control systems are ubiquitous in modern technology, comprising an engineered plant to be kept within specific, often fine-tuned, limits, and a separate controller that ensures this is the case. While modern controllers often employ digital…
The human brain has many remarkable information processing characteristics that deeply puzzle scientists and engineers. Among the most important and the most intriguing of these characteristics are the brain's broad universality as a…
One of the most fundamental questions in Biology or Artificial Intelligence is how the human brain performs mathematical functions. How does a neural architecture that may organise itself mostly through statistics, know what to do? One…
The Turing Machine is the paradigmatic case of computing machines, but there are others such as analogical, connectionist, quantum and diverse forms of unconventional computing, each based on a particular intuition of the phenomenon of…
Reverse engineering the brain is proving difficult, perhaps impossible. While many believe that this is just a matter of time and effort, a different approach might help. Here, we describe a very simple idea which explains the power of the…
MemComputing is a new model of computation that exploits the non-equilibrium property-we call 'memory'-of any physical system to respond to external perturbations by keeping track of how it has reacted at previous times. Its digital,…
The machinery of the human brain -- analog, probabilistic, embodied -- can be characterized computationally, but what machinery confers what computational powers? Any such system can be abstractly cast in terms of two computational…
With the great success in simulating many intelligent behaviors using computing devices, there has been an ongoing debate whether all conscious activities are computational processes. In this paper, the answer to this question is shown to…
What does it mean to claim that a physical or natural system computes? One answer, endorsed here, is that computing is about programming a system to behave in different ways. This paper offers an account of what it means for a physical…
Representation is a key notion in neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI). However, a longstanding philosophical debate highlights that specifying what counts as representation is trickier than it seems. With this brief opinion paper…
Physical processes are computations only when we use them to externalize thought. Computation is the performance of one or more fixed processes within a contingent environment. We reformulate the Church-Turing thesis so that it applies to…
Dynamical Systems theory generally deals with fixed point iterations of continuous functions. Computation by Turing machine although is a fixed point iteration but is not continuous. This specific category of fixed point iterations can only…
Efforts at understanding the computational processes in the brain have met with limited success, despite their importance and potential uses in building intelligent machines. We propose a simple new model which draws on recent findings in…
The neural mechanism of memory has a very close relation with the problem of representation in artificial intelligence. In this paper a computational model was proposed to simulate the network of neurons in brain and how they process…
Human brain has been used as an inspiration for building autonomous agents, but it is not obvious what level of computational description of the brain one should use. This has led to overly opinionated symbolic approaches and overly…
Dynamical systems are a broad class of mathematical tools used to describe the evolution of physical and computational processes. Traditionally these processes model changing entities in a static world. Picture a ball rolling on an empty…