there's a story that originally ECT was discovered as a way to treat manic people after someone observed that chimps in captivity who got that way, but also had epileptic fits, were calmer after a fit. so then realising you could induce something that looked like a fit in chimps and therefore likely in people, the treatment was born, and many people suffered from this ludicrous idea for decades - I heard more recently, ECT has been somewhat rehabilitated and isn't used as a means to control unruly patients but actually has theraputic value, but the origin tale is still alarming.
so what about other ideas that are based in leaky reasoning, for example...
artificial neural networks as a way to build classifiers? not with anything like the same node degree distribution or mechanism for firing whatsoever, so how would one build so many aNNs almost none of which bear any ressemblance to what goes on in our heads?
evolutionary programming (e.g. GP/GA) as a way to do optimisation? but note evolution is about natural selection of anything that fits the niche in the environment - that doesn't make it an optimisation at all, just a choice.
bio-inspired search, e..g based in ants trailing pheremones? as with evolution, this is a blind process that assumes nothing about the setup, and is mind bogglingly wasteful.
Are there actually any vaguely sustainable ways of tackling these tasks (classifiers, optimisation, search) - of course there are...
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