How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

by Ray Kurzweil

How do we set the many parameters that control a pattern recognition system’s functioning? These could include the number of vectors that we allow in the vector quantization step, the initial topology of hierarchical states (before the training phase of the hidden Markov model process prunes them back), the recognition threshold at each level of the hierarchy, the parameters that control the handling of the size parameters, and many others. We can establish these based on our intuition, but the results will be far from optimal. We call these parameters “God parameters” because they are set prior to the self-organizing method of determining the topology of the hidden Markov models (or, in the biological case, before the person learns her lessons by similarly creating connections in her cortical hierarchy). This is perhaps a misnomer, given that these initial DNA-based design details are determined by biological evolution, though some may see the hand of God in that process