neural networks and filePro

[Fairlight]

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> 
> Don't complain.  Just go to 'Your Account' and select what you want
> in the form of emails from them.  I have them send me the weekly

I signed up for Amazon (as I'm sure most did) years ago.  I dislike it when
they introduce things like that and enable them by default.  They just
started the mailings this month--first ones I've ever received, and it's
been two in three weeks or less.  That's almost as bad as the -four-
fP-Tech mailings in as many weeks regarding one of their classes/specials
for fPSQl at one point.  :)  ("OB: fP" [for you old USENET dogs...you know
who you are!])

> And there is a section called "Improve my recommendations" base on
> previous purchases so you can sort of fine tune your
> recommendations.

I'm already using three of their RSS feeds.  I don't need to clutter my
inbox as well. :)

> You can change that too.  And it's not on personality but on previous
> purchases - and you can exclude items from the recommendations.

Yes, but I've seen some dreadfully mismatched recommendations based on past
purchases.  :)  

> > Hell, people can't even accurately judge others' personalities--I
> > surely wouldn't trust such a subjective job to a computer, which will
> > be easily deceived, and which has no concept of motivations.
>
> Why do you think it is judging personalities.  It's based on items you
> have purchased.

I don't necessarily say it -is-, I'm thinking in terms of Walter's original
post.  When I think neural network, I think of the capacity for learning.

I don't think it should be raw correlation of, "You bought 'x', 20 other
people bought 'x' and also bought 'y', so you would probably like 'y' as
well."  That's a broad generalisation based on little data.

A -real- neural net I should think would have at least a limited ability to
"learn"...at least some form of AI would be involved.  So it would look at
-all- the purchases someone has made and develop personality profiles and
-then- compare personality types rather than raw purchases.  It's sort of
like the MMPI-II, but applied to "normal" (whatever that is!) individuals.
You take a standardised set of criterion and apply it over a -broad- range
of questions that cover critical areas, and you can evaluate someone's
personality fairly accurately based on the results.  But you can't do it on
the basis of two people answering questions 23 and 37 identically and one
answers question 37 with a 'C', then the other likely will have as well.
Or worse, generalising a -lot- further by genre--you buy one type of hard
SciFi and get recommendations for a bunch of much weaker SF, or a really
specialised side of Fantasy (Glen Cook's Black Company series) that is
-not- your classic Fantasy, and you'll start getting recommendations for
all sorts of regular old Fantasy titles.

It's just not intelligent enough.

mark->
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