Subject: Re: PART TWO: winning industrial-use of lisp: Re: Norvig's latest paper on Lisp
From: rpw3@rigden.engr.sgi.com (Rob Warnock)
Date: 21 Jun 2002 11:56:52 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <aev4a4$2sb7q$1@fido.engr.sgi.com>
James A. Crippen <james@unlambda.com> wrote:
+---------------
| I wonder if humans use deep or shallow binding?  I'd bet on shallow,
| just as a hunch.  Our symbol lookup seems to be linear, or even
| linearithmic.
+---------------

I recall reading a paper decades ago in what was then called the
"Bell System Technical Journal" (BSTJ) in which they reported on
human response times for a (member x memorized-word-list)) task.
[BSTJ used to publish a lot of human engineering & perception research
in those days.] The fascinating thing about the results they got
was that the response time was linearly proportional to the length
of the memorized word list, but *not* to the position of the test
word in the list!


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, 30-3-510		<rpw3@sgi.com>
SGI Network Engineering		<http://www.rpw3.org/>
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy.		Phone: 650-933-1673
Mountain View, CA  94043	PP-ASEL-IA

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