Orientation to An Introduction to Natural Computation, chapter 1

Dana Ballard is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. His area of expertise is the human visual system and he has been one of the leaders of the connectionist revolution in cognitive science during the last 20 years. The first chapter of his recent book provides a nice introduction to the course, covering and introducing many of the key issues that we will focus on throughout the term. The section on "minimum description length" is particularly interesting from a computer science point of view, because it suggests that the best solution is not necessarily optimal. The theme of the first part of the course is "a small brain in a big world." Think about this theme as you read this chapter.

Notes on readings for the course: When you do the readings in this course don’t simply read the article and put it away. You should make reading an active process. As you read you should consider why each article was chosen for the course, how the article fits into the overall structure of the course, etc. In addition you should track things you do and don’t understand to be ready to ask questions in class. Just because you are reading these articles does not mean you should treat them as gospel. Expect to disagree with parts of articles, or even articles in their entirety. Further, some parts of a given article may not be relevant and may be skimmed. One of the skills you should develop during this course is the ability to discern what parts of an article to focus on, and what parts may be skimmed; after all, it is a big world.