What does the program feel?

Foreword

I present to you the next part of the opus on the thinking program. This is not a standalone article, but a logical continuation of the first part , so all the “new ones” I urge you to follow the link. And while we are waiting for them, you can make yourself coffee (tea, make juice, maybe something stronger) and get ready for active thinking activities - there is a lot of information. Today the senses will be in the center of attention.

I will continue the thought voiced at the end of the last article. To achieve our goal, you need to highlight all sorts of human characteristics and look at which ones can be abandoned relatively painlessly, and which are so closely connected with others that they will have to be implemented. The latter include, for example, sleep. It plays an important role in a person’s life, and for us it’s first of all interesting that in a dream a person restores emotional and motivational balance and psychological defense. So no sleep - no way. Another example I recently thought about is the ability to retell texts, which derives from our recognition mechanisms and memory devices.

In general, there is a more practical sense in identifying such features - in the future they will help to calibrate the system, comparing the results of the program and the person. Then it will be clear what parameters can be tweaked, so that the program copes with the task more effectively than the person, but at the same time, in general, retains its behavior. It may well be that the learning speed will have some limitations besides the power of the computer.

Such an analysis and finding links between the features is almost the only way to design such a complex program. After all, there is no way to present the entire model entirely. There is no such science. There is neurophysiology, there is psychology and there are sciences created at their intersection. There are many “types” of sciences, which, despite the general absurdity and notorious inaccuracy, sometimes contain very useful ideas (mnemonics, NLP). But the most interesting thing is that all of them either contradict each other, or do not have intersection points at all, and the models described inside each are far from complete and complete. I only thought earlier that I would take a fat reference book on human physiology and find answers to all the questions there.
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As a result, you have to act almost intuitively. In the first article a peculiar level of abstraction was set, on which the whole system will be built. Obviously, this level is higher than that of a person’s central nervous system, but this is not a reason to consider this model as obviously inoperable. Initially, almost a year ago, I singled out functions at an even higher level of abstraction, which, unfortunately, is not amenable to formalization and now I have to find the foundation. And here inevitable mistakes for all the same reason - it is impossible to imagine the entire model as a whole. So do not be surprised if the original concept of nodes will undergo changes - it adapts to the new functionality.

Sense organs

Before considering how a person remembers, remembers, recognizes speech and finds a solution to problems, you need to know how information is distributed across nodes. And for this you need to trace its path from an external source and to the memory. So, let's talk about the senses.

In humans, they are implemented on specific groups of neurons associated with cells that are sensitive to particular stimuli. But we have a slightly different organization. A person from birth already has brain zones for all occasions. And we have some are created in the process of working in memory.

To cope with this problem is not difficult. The senses will be the same nodes or groups of nodes, only they will be outside the memory, and their content will be a function of the corresponding stimulus. Each time this content changes, a logical unit-reflection is created in the memory. It is she who runs all the thought processes, but more on that later.

So far, the decision is not entirely successful - sooner or later, the operational memory will devour the entire swap and will still require supplementation. Yes, and man can not keep everything in my head. After all, we calculated that, on average, we can keep in mind seven (plus or minus 2) new images. But not many people know or simply did not think that this applies only to one sense organ. That is, a person can hold twice as many figures in his head if he remembers half visually and half by ear.

We use this observation to complement our model. So, for each sense organ in RAM, a certain amount should be allocated - the number of nodes for reflections. If this limit is exceeded, a rotation occurs - the new node replaces the oldest of the group of this body. If the old node did not have time to connect with its brothers from the permanent or RAM, then it is deleted permanently.

It seems to be all cool - RAM is no longer growing in an arithmetic progression, but has a fixed size. But what to do when new nodes stop coming? Continue to handle old? This is equivalent to as if you were going to go to bed and, turning off the TV and closing your eyes, would continue to hear the last chords and see the performers standing on the screen. Something is wrong here! We missed something ...

And we have missed such a thing as a short-term memory. Although it is so called, it is not a memory in the usual sense of the word. That is, by itself, it does not initiate any binding, and if no one else initiated it, the contents of the short-term memory will be irretrievably lost and no hypnosis will help. The only thing she does is to artificially prolong the life of sensations, whose sources — stimuli — have already ceased to act. And all this so that we can "realize" these sensations and, if necessary, have time to process.

To understand this, imagine such a situation - night, a dark room, a camera flash is triggered. It lasts a split second, but you have a few seconds to "see" the room. Or another situation - morning, dark room, the alarm clock squeals disgustingly. You automatically grope a button, the scream stops, but you can still hear its echoes for a while. In humans, this is due to the inertness of the sensitive cells. And in our system, such behavior can be modeled by setting a timer — the lifetime — for each reflection node.

If the information about the stimulus is updated quickly and the turn came to overwrite the old node, but its lifetime has not yet come out, then it is still overwritten. If the information is updated slowly or stops flowing altogether, then after the timers are triggered, the nodes release the RAM (sent to a constant or to / dev / null).

Well, now we have traced the path of information from the senses and to memory.

Motivations and emotions

Let us see what happens in humans during the work of the sense organs at a low level - at the level of neurons. A real neuron has quite a few parameters that can vary depending on various factors, but at the moment we are only interested in one thing - the polarization of the membrane. In the normal, not excited state, its value is about 70 millivolts.

When a stimulus begins to act on a cell, the potential difference gradually increases by 25 percent, and then starts jumping to zero and back, thereby generating impulses. This is a normal working condition. Further, the amplitude of the oscillations begins to gradually decrease to zero, the oscillations cease, and the potential difference on the membrane surfaces is already half the norm. This is due to depletion of cell resources. If the stimulus still continues to act, and it did not succeed in adapting, then the tension then starts to just monotonously fall. When it reaches zero, the cell will die.

What do these numbers say? The polarization of the membrane is a reflection of the processes occurring in the cell, which mobilizes its reserves in order to increase resistance to stimuli, to adapt to them. Each stimulus new to the cell is initially unfavorable, which causes the cell to try to adapt to it. If in the end it adapts to the stimulus, then it is considered positive, since it increases the biological stability of the cell, and the body should strive for such stimuli. If it was not possible to adapt, and the cell has exhausted its reserves, resulting in low polarization, then such an irritant is negative and the body should avoid it, since it reduces the biological stability.

Probably, it should already be a little clear where the legs grow from emotions and motivation. At a low level, they operate on the principle of approximation-distance - the desire to maintain a positive stimulus and get rid of the negative. But in order to transfer all this to our model, information is still not enough.

Let's pay attention to this point: in normal working condition, the polarization rises monotonously at first, and then the oscillations begin - what does this mean? This means that at first the cell itself tries to process the stimulus, and then signals to its neighbors to help it with this. Well, then the energy for oscillations is no longer enough. There comes the so-called period of fatigue, when the cell is already powerless to do anything and is on the verge of death.

Here, it is already possible to begin to transfer all this economy to our favorite nodes. The first thing that catches the eye is the state of the cell, which is naturally realized in the form of a “node” object property. You can try to present its contents as an enumeration (states). I don’t know if that is enough. Otherwise, you have to decide in the forehead - to use floating point numbers. Such a solution is undoubtedly closer to the original, but the CPU time will be the price for this, which in our case is highly undesirable.

Now the question arises - what does “the cell itself is trying to process the stimulus”? The cell is in our case a node. Tries herself - the other nodes are not participating yet. To process the stimulus - and here is not so simple. In general, this means that eventually there must be a reaction or action.

In humans, this feature is realized with the help of reflexes, which, as you know, are divided into conditioned (acquired) and unconditioned (inborn). Both those and others work in a similar way - the excitement in one area of ​​the brain, through previously formed connections, spreads to another area. This other area may be directly responsible for performing any external action (close your eyes, grab an item). And it can transmit excitement through its connections to the third region. Thus, reflexes can be of the first, second and more orders.

But we have, as mentioned earlier, a different organization and distribution of functions. Let's try to transfer the behavior described above to it. So, the first area with which the excitement begins is our reflection node, which came from the senses. Since he is not connected with anything yet, he will have to find in memory his closest analogue in content, a kind of “call to a friend”. Immediately I say that a person does not have such an operation, since no copying takes place during the transmission of information from the senses (creating a reflection).

Found analog is copied into RAM for later work with him. Thus, we have clarified something about the structure of this memory. In addition to the areas designated for storing reflections, it has a separate area for memories. I suspect that it also has a division into the corresponding sense organs with the corresponding volumes measured in the nodes (the volumes may differ from similar reflections in the field of reflections). In the field of memories, the treatment of the stimulus itself begins — the search for a reaction with the aim of prolonging it, or vice versa — to stop I will write more about this in one of the following articles.

But, if the corresponding reaction is not found, or if the analogue of the stimulus itself is not found, the second phase of the node's operation begins - connecting to the search for its neighbors, such as “hall assistance”.

To understand who these neighbors are, consider a simple example of a sense organ - the command line. It will consist of several nodes, each of which can store one character entered. Since the incoming information may contain several lines, our body will not be able to perceive the entire text. Consequently, the contents of our sense organ (array of nodes) will change as the frames of the film change.

Then, if the first phase of the processing of the stimulus is reduced to the search for a symbol, then during the second phase, a search is performed on a line fragment. Then everything happens, as in the first phase - the found group of nodes is copied into the region of memories and already there manipulations are made with it.

The third phase is a period of fatigue. It comes when the previous two failed. Nothing special happens in it, all search processes are inhibited. The sense organ stops responding to this stimulus. In real neurons, there is also a fourth phase - death. But it seems to me that you can do without it.

Summarize. The following processes take place in the field of reflections - rotation, deletion by timer of the search for analogs with the subsequent creation of copies in the field of memories. But there are still two points that have not yet been clarified - these are, in fact, motivation and emotions, in honor of which this section is named.

In fact, at the low level, there is a direct connection between motivation and emotion. Just above, I wrote that in addition to the main content of the node (in the example with the command line it is a symbol), it also has a property that reflects in real time the state in which the node is located (rest, agitated, fatigue).

So, after processing in the field of memories, when a node is sent to storage, this very state is written to it. If this is a state of excitement, then this means that an adequate response has been found to this stimulus. Accordingly, this stimulus becomes positive, and in the future will cause a positive emotion. If the node is in a state of fatigue, this means that the reaction is not found and the stimulus becomes negative, causing a negative emotion.

Finally, consider an example that illustrates this behavior. Imagine that at home you are solving a complex math problem. If you manage to solve it, then you will remember it with positive emotions, and when in the class you are asked to solve something similar, then you will do it with joy and offer to help your neighbor. But if the problem was not solved at home, then it will be remembered with negative emotions, since it only caused fatigue in you, and the result was never found. Then, when the same task is slipped to you in the class, your hands will simply fall.

Afterword

In this article, I vividly demonstrated the method I wrote about at the very beginning - highlighting the features and their formalization. As you can see, at the moment our model is in places at odds with the central nervous system device. But what is more important for you - identity at a low level or identity in behavior? This and that is impossible in this case, since the central nervous system operates on living cells, and we have only a computer and programming languages ​​at our disposal. So at a low level, we will inevitably have differences due to the characteristics of our platform. But this does not mean that in this way we will not be able to implement high-level behavior. In addition, we have a bonus - we can twist many parameters as you like, thereby affecting the performance of the program as a whole.

And finally, I have a question for those who are interested in this article. Here was considered the general behavior of the senses, as well as an example of one of them - the command line. What other “sense organs” can be implemented on such a platform?