From: Andy Wilson <ajw@Think.COM>
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 93 15:52:13 PDT
To: bill@twwells.com
Subject: Visa, HNC Inc. develop neural network as a weapon to fight fraud
In-Reply-To: <CCC2Iu.7ny@twwells.com>
Message-ID: <9308252250.AA17771@custard.think.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


   From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
   Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1993 21:04:05 GMT

   In article <9308252001.AA14017@custard.think.com>,
   Andy Wilson <ajw@Think.COM> wrote:
   : [mostly bogus stuff]

   That is irrelevant to cypherpunks, as I understand the list.

The prospect of the impossibility of anonymity and the uses
to which personal information is made in a cashless economy is 
not relevant?  I beg to differ.  This is exactly what digital
cash is meant to prevent.

   There is no technology, including that of privacy, that cannot be
   used for ill. We don't know how they're going to be using the
   neural network. They could, as was suggested, abandon their minds
   and and rely on the neural net. I don't think they will because
   doing so would be a really bad business decision. Furthermore, on
   the evidence, the neural network output will only be used as one
   datum in a process involving many inputs and a human making the
   final decision. Finally, in the examples I'm familiar with (from
   reading AI Expert), when a neural net is used as a decision
   element, precisely because of its error rate, the decision isn't
   "go/no go" but "go/refer the problem to a human".

The problem with referring a neural network's decision to a human
is that the neural network gives no information other than the 
probability of fraud.  It does not tell the human why it determined
the transaction was likely to be flawed,  like a system based on 
rules or case-based reasoning would be able to do.  There is not any 
good way to combine the judgement of the neural net with that of a
human for that reason.

With respect,  I have found AI Expert to consist more of marketing
hype than correct and useful information on artificial intelligence 
technology.

Andy