Re: Theme One Program • Jets and Sharks • (1) • (2)

Example 5. Jets and Sharks (cont.)

Given a representation of the Jets and Sharks universe in computer memory, we naturally want to see if the memory serves to supply the facts a well-constructed data base should.

In their PDP Handbook presentation of the Jets and Sharks example, McClelland and Rumelhart suggest several exercises for the reader to explore the performance of their neural pool memory model on the tasks of retrieval and generalization (Exercise 2.1).

Using cactus graphs or minimal negations to implement pools of mutually inhibitory neurons lends itself to neural architectures on a substantially different foundation from the garden variety connectionist models.  At a high level of abstraction, however, there is enough homology between the two orders to compare their performance on many of the same tasks.  With that in mind, I tried Theme One on a number of examples like the ones suggested by McClelland and Rumelhart.

What follows is a brief discussion of two examples as given in the original User Guide.  Next time I’ll fill in more details about the examples and discuss their bearing on the larger issues at hand.

With a query on the name “ken” we obtain the following output, giving all the features associated with Ken.

With a query on the two features “college” and “sharks” we obtain the following outline of all features satisfying those constraints.

From this we discover all college Sharks are 30‑something and married.  Further, we have a complete listing of their names broken down by occupation.

To be continued …

References

• McClelland, J.L. (2015), Explorations in Parallel Distributed Processing : A Handbook of Models, Programs, and Exercises, 2nd ed. (draft), Stanford Parallel Distributed Processing Lab.  Online, Section 2.3, Figure 2.1.
• McClelland, J.L., and Rumelhart, D.E. (1988), Explorations in Parallel Distributed Processing : A Handbook of Models, Programs, and Exercises, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.  “Figure 1. Characteristics of a number of individuals belonging to two gangs, the Jets and the Sharks”, p. 39, from McClelland (1981).
• McClelland, J.L. (1981), “Retrieving General and Specific Knowledge From Stored Knowledge of Specifics”, Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Berkeley, CA.

Resources

• Theme One Program • Overview
• Theme One Program • Exposition
• Theme One Program • User Guide
• Theme One Program • Survey Page
• Example. Jets and Sharks (odt) (pdf)

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