Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very reliably observed in the data, but to date it escaped satisfactory theoretical explanation. This article suggests that Zipf's law may result from a hierarchical organization…

We consider human performance on an optimal stopping problem where people are presented with a list of numbers independently chosen from a uniform distribution. People are told how many numbers are in the list, and how they were chosen. People are then shown the numbers one at a time, and are instructed to choose the maximum, subject to the…

Two experiments show that action alters the shape categories formed by 2-year-olds. Experiment 1 shows that moving an object horizontally (or vertically) defines the horizontal (or vertical) axis as the main axis of elongation and systematically changes the range of shapes seen as similar. Experiment 2 shows that moving an object symmetrically (or…

Summarizes an initial foray in tackling artificial intelligence problems using a connectionist approach. The task chosen is visual recognition of Origami objects, and the questions answered are how to construct a connectionist network to represent and recognize projected Origami line drawings and the advantages such an approach would have. (30…