Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10
Recognition: The Future and Beyond
“I have an almost religious zeal — not for technology per se, but for
the Internet, which is for me the nervous system of mother Earth,
which I see as a living creature, linking up.” —
Dan Millman
10.1 Medium of Change
Through the evolution of time, we can see how a simple electronic calculator
has superseded the abacus, which was devised by people in the pre-historic era
thousands of years ago. The functionalities of both devices are similar, i.e., a
tool for arithmetic calculations. Currently, the use of the electronic calculator
has reached far beyond the capabilities and functionalities of its predecessors
while preserving its basic set of operations. Complex numerical calculations
can be performed using existing scientific calculators that are available in the
market.
The reason for starting the final chapter with this example is that we can see
that improvements of functionality can be expected from changes that have
been made to a device or object that is being used. As has once been said by
Marshall McLuhan [127], “A change of medium inevitably leads to a change
in the message.” From this perspective, in regards to pattern recognition, we
could argue that changes in the way we perform recognition might extend its
functions and capabilities. This is relevant to the discussions that have been
presented in this topic. The way we look at how pattern recognition is per-
formed can be changed if we consider a different approach, i.e., a distributed
approach.
This topic has been dedicated to exploring different ways of implementing
pattern recognition using machine intelligence. Decades of work in improving
pattern recognition algorithms have reached their height. It is now the time
for us to revisit the fundamentals of biological intelligence, specifically human
intelligence. As was mentioned in the preface of this topic, the human brain
is, in its actual form, a fully distributed network of computational machines,
known as neurons. If we are able to map this into existing computational
networks, we see that the Internet is actually a physical brain of our entire
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