SSP 100/ LING 144
| Syllabus | Homeworks | Course Policy | Lecture Notes | Profiles |
Instructor: Professor David Beaver (Linguistics)
Teaching Assistants: Gary Gongwer, Neville Sanjana
For further administrative information, click here.
Goal of the Course:
In this course, we hope to introduce you to the fundamental ideas addressed in the Symbolic Systems Program. Due to the program's interdisciplinary nature, the course will by necessity cover a great number of topics. Also, we realize that the students come from a wide variety of backgrounds. So while we present a vast array of material, we will keep the material as accessible as possible.
Organization of the Course:The course is designed as a set of three independent modules, each of which presents a single underlying topic from a variety of perspectives. The modules to be presented are
Organization of the Individual Modules:Each three-week module is composed of five or six topics, with associated readings. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the course, no one text covered all the areas. As a result, we have chosen a number of highly influential and informative articles and book chapters and created a course reader, which is available at the Stanford University Bookstore. The lecture topics and corresponding readings are given below.
| Topic | Overview | Reading | Speaker |
|---|---|---|---|
| From Aristotle to Godel | A History of Reason! | Turing | David Israel |
| No Computation without Representation | Reasoning, representation and search. | Brooks | |
| Games, Decisions, and Paradoxes | "The Prisoner's Dilemma" and other logical problems. | Johan van Benthem | |
| Mental Models/ How People Reason | How humans approach problems. | Baron,
Tversky and Shafir |
John McCarthy |
| The Matrix | How a net can reason, and how the brain is neworked. | Gleitman et al. (ONLY first reading: pgs. 28-42) |
John Gabrieli |
| Linguistic Inference | Planning and interpreting language. | Justine Cassell
SSP Forum |
| Topic | Overview | Reading | Speaker |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nativism vs. Empiricism | The centuries-old debate about whether human knowledge is innate or gained throught experience. | Gardner | Jerry Hobbs |
| Language Acquisition | The processes involved in learning human language. | Eve Clark | |
| Cognitive Development | Various views of the stages one undergoes in mental development. | Gleitman pp.545-572 | Barbara Tversky SSP Forum |
| Learning & Reasoning | More Cognitive Development & Learning by Analogy | Hinton | Todd Davies |
| Formal Models | Introduction to Learning Machines | Daphne Koller | |
| HCI | Issues involved in Human-Computer Interaction. | Terry Winograd |
| Topic | Overview | Reading | Speaker |
|---|---|---|---|
| Perceptual Illusion Berkeley/Descartes |
Some common (and entertaining) ways in which what we perceive differs from what's really there. | Hardin | |
| Audition/Signal Detection | What does it take for us to be able to perceive something? | Coombs, et al. Goldstein | Jonathan Berger |
| Reading & Speech | Models of perception of the written and spoken word, along with some connections between the two. | Goldstein | SSP Honors Presentations |
| The seeing brain | The neural basis of perception | Bill Newsome | |
| Computational Theory
of Perception |
How can a vision system work? | Beiderman | Josh Tenenbaum |
| Topic | Overview | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| Can machines think? | A closing debate on minds, computers, thought and conciousness. | Surprise... |
Links:
The Monty hall puzzle:
Both a rigorous
proof and
a demonstration
A whole bunch of
Perceptual Illusions
Supplemental Bibliography:
(i.e., readings mentioned in class)
Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1999). Godel, Escher, Bach:
An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books.
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