![]() ![]() ![]() Chomsky's conception of language, on the other hand, stressed the complexity of internal representations, encoded in the genome, and their maturation in light of the right data into a sophisticated computational system, one that cannot be usefully broken down into a set of associations. Skinner's approach stressed the historical associations between a stimulus and the animal's response-an approach easily framed as a kind of empirical statistical analysis, predicting the future as a function of the past. The undoing of Skinner's grip on psychology is commonly marked by Chomsky's 1959 critical review of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior, a book in which Skinner attempted to explain linguistic ability using behaviorist principles. Skinner, where animal behavior was reduced to a simple set of associations between an action and its subsequent reward or punishment. Chomsky and his colleagues had to overthrow the then-dominant paradigm of behaviorism, championed by Harvard psychologist B.F. Noam Chomsky and others worked on what became cognitive science, a field aimed at uncovering the mental representations and rules that underlie our perceptual and cognitive abilities. Some of McCarthy's colleagues in neighboring departments, however, were more interested in how intelligence is implemented in humans (and other animals) first. ![]() Instantiating an intelligent system using man-made hardware, rather than our own "biological hardware" of cells and tissues, would show ultimate understanding, and have obvious practical applications in the creation of intelligent devices or even robots. In 1956, the computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) to describe the study of intelligence by implementing its essential features on a computer. Yet the diverse fields that took on this challenge, from philosophy and psychology to computer science and neuroscience, have been fraught with disagreement about the right approach. If one were to rank a list of civilization's greatest and most elusive intellectual challenges, the problem of "decoding" ourselves-understanding the inner workings of our minds and our brains, and how the architecture of these elements is encoded in our genome-would surely be at the top. ![]()
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