Are connectionist models and symbolic models competing or Essay

Are connectionist models and symbolic models competing or complementary appraoaches to artificial intelligence - Essay Example Both these approaches have their supporters who have used them to show the various benefits which can be derived from taking different viewpoint to AI (Minsky, 1991). At the same time, there are those who have said that the approaches are complimentary and do not compete with each other. To justify these statements it is necessary to take a look at each approach to see how it works. The symbolic approach is based on the creation of AI models that work with symbol manipulation. Computation is based on the fact that a symbol or a group of symbols can be arranged in a manner to represent information. Once the order or position of symbols is changed, the information can also be updated to reflect the changing environment. It must be noted that in this approach a symbol can represent any type or nature of information and the symbols can be modified if required (Bader & Hitzler, 2005). Thus a symbol here represents an idea which has certain basic premises but which can be modified by the machine based on experience or intelligent action. This process of symbol manipulation can be very successful if the AI process is being applied to well-structured problems. That means if the symbols are predefined for the AI system, it can modify the associated parameters based on its own experience and manipulation of the symbols (Bader & Hitzler, 2005). This method seeks to replicate the higher order thinking processes of the human mind which has the same ability to modify and learn from experiences as they are collected in a person’s memory. However, this approach has certain failings as well since it is difficult to grasp commonsense reality with this approach. On the other hand, the connectionist models for AI are based on the idea of using a large number of relatively simple units which can handle extremely difficult and