Architecture
- A large number of units which are connected to others (connectionism) and the connections have different strengths (weights)
- Units are arranged in layers
- Computation happens in parallel
Representation
- Like in a classical GOFAI system, representations are assigned to connectionist networks by the people who build them
- There are two types of connectionist representation
- localist → each unit is assigned a feature as a whole that represents
- distributed → state of the network as a whole represents something
- often claimed to be one of the distinctive features of connectionism
- connectionist networks is sometimes called parallel distributed processing (PDP)
- Can be trained to learn and resembles the structure of the brain much more closely than any classical computer