## Fan effect

Is the "fan out effect" the same as the fan effect? Earcanal (talk) 17:44, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

The Texai link doesn't lead to an open source project, but a company. Maybe there is an error. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.204.59.75 (talk) 14:35, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

## This is wrong, Anderson and myself are right. Markov chains

The formal description is faulty as usual. For example, the activation level is in [0,1], but the algorithm presented may activate nodes to more than 1.0 There are other problems. The only sound descriptions I know are Anderson 1983 and my own PhD diss. My diss. also contains a comparison with Markov chains. When I have time I'll try to improve this article. Others please feel free. My diss. can be found here is here: https://www.box.com/shared/static/m4f8icz86m3dkv7r9dpa.pdf Marius63 (talk) 11:39, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

## Other papers

Also these papers are relevant to SA and Semantic Web:

www.waset.org/ijcs/v1/v1-3-30.pdf

I need to improve the formatting of the formulas using TeX Help:Displaying a formula User:StephenReed 21:53, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

## Relation to Markov chain?

The spreading activation algorithm, as described in this article, appears to be similar to a Markov chain, and, based on my current reading/misunderstanding of this article, appears to be almost identical, except for various odd tweaks (like the minimal F to fire). To be precise, if ${\displaystyle W_{ij}}$ is the weight matrix from this article, and R is the decay factor from this article, then, from what I can tell,

${\displaystyle p_{ij}=\delta _{ij}+RW_{ij}}$

seems to give a very nearly equivalent Markov chain. (Although the ${\displaystyle p_{ij}}$, as I wrote it here, is mis-normalized, which might be why the activation of the neurons needs to be clamped to zero, one, since this mis-normalization will propagate through. Proper normalization wouldn't require clamping). FWIW, the symbol ${\displaystyle \delta _{ij}}$ is the Kronecker delta function.

To summarize: the only differences I can spot are:

• Use of the minimal firing factor F
• Clamping (which wouldn't be needed if the system was normalized)

Am I missing something else? I ask, because these two differences alone, although they alter the Markov chain result somewhat, really wouldn't make much of a qualitative difference. And if there's no qualtitative difference, it begs the question: why bother with this (what would the theoretical reasons be?) as opposed to the far-more-widely-known, better-understood Markov chain? linas (talk) 15:36, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Peer Review from Ups46694 (talk) 20:29, 17 October 2012 (UTC)ups46694

This article should have: a good lead section, clear structure, balanced coverage, neutral content, and reliable sources.

Elements that make this article good: • Content is neutral. • No grammatical or spelling problems. • There is no warning banner at the top of the article. • The first two sentences of the lead are good enough for the leading paragraph, cut out the last three sentences (or put them under another section). • The links throughout the article (though there aren’t very many) do work. • The notes section is decent. • All of the content is there, but there needs to be more under each section.