What is computation, really?
What role does computation play in cognitive science?
What are symbolic and connectionist models of cognition, and how do they differ from one another?
Are there any limitations to what can be computed, in principle?
What might these limits imply about human or machine intelligence?
What is embodied cognitive science?
The best way to understand computation is to do lots of it. (It's also great fun!)
We need a precise, unambiguous notation for describing computations.
Many notations are readily available, each with their pros and cons.
We will use the programming language Python as our principal notation. (We'll be able to watch our computations in action!)
Other notations we will study: Turing machines
We will study embodied cognition by experimenting with robots.
We will read several important papers from AI and cognitive science.
Main goal: gain an understanding of computational models of intelligence.
Easy to learn.
Interactive.
Powerful and flexible.
Enables us to use Pyro for programming robots and neural networks.