August 2000 CO230 : Cognitive Science (Question 1)

(a) Two architectures of intelligent systems, the Von Neumann and connectionist architectures, are discussed in the course material.
(i) Briefly describe the features of the von Neumann architecture that are
similar to the brain. [3]
(ii) Briefly describe the features of the connectionist architecture that are
similar to the brain. [3]

(b) Learning is a permanent change in knowledge and behaviour that comes as a result of experience. Briefly describe classical conditioning and observational
learning. From young, we were trained to vacate a building if the fire alarm
rings. What type of learning is involved? [3]

(c) Sorting is a task that is often performed by us in daily life as well as in automated processes. For each
(i) Throw away the mackerals and keep everything else [1]
(ii) Put the blue fish in bin 1 and the red fish in bin 2. [1]

(d) “Heuristic search allow us to find the best path to the goal-state”. Explain why this statement is false. [2]

(e) Fuzzy logic extends binary logic to handle certain situations that are not
possible for binary logic to handle.
(i) How do the two types of logic differ with respect to the result
generated? [1]
(ii) Briefly describe the term ‘linguistic variable’, giving an appropriate
example. [2]
(iii) Let represent the membership value of the output fuzzy set after a
fuzzy operation on the fuzzy set A with a value of x in the universe of
discourse. State the operation that is performed by the formula
. If A is the fuzzy set tall, what is the fuzzy set A’? [2]

(f) Edge detection is an activity in low level vision.
(i) What are edges in an image? [1]
(ii) Why is edge detection important? [1]

(g) Briefly describe feature analysis with respect to visual pattern recognition. [2]

(h) The Turing test has often been criticised for being biased towards symbolic
solving tasks as well as making the assumption that only human beings are
intelligent enough to be used as basis for comparison. Briefly describe two
other weaknesses of the test. [4]

(i) In the context of Natural Language Processing, define the following terms: [4]
(i) syntax
(ii) semantics
(iii) pragmatics
(iv) world knowledge