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HEALTH AND NUTRITION, WATER, ENERGY, AND THE ENVIRONMENT, EDUCATION

Symbolic vs. connectionist approaches

BY AAP Bridge at AAPBridge

AI research follows two distinct, and to some extent competing, methods, the symbolic (or “top-down”) approach, and the connectionist (or “bottom-up”) approach. The top-down approach seeks to replicate intelligence by analyzing cognition independent of the biological structure of the brain, in terms of the processing of symbols—whence the symbolic label. The bottom-up approach, on the other hand, involves creating artificial neural networks in imitation of the brain’s structure—whence the connectionist label.
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 the task of building a system, equipped with an optical scanner, that recognizes the letters of the alphabet. A bottom-up approach typically involves training an artificial neural network by presenting letters to it one by one, gradually improving performance by “tuning” the network. (Tuning adjusts the responsiveness of different neural pathways to different stimuli.) In contrast, a top-down approach typically involves writing a computer program that compares each letter with geometric descriptions.

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