We have developed principles integrating connectionist and symbolic computation by establishing mathematical relationships between two levels of description of a single computational system: at the lower level, the system is formally
described in terms of highly distributed patterns
of activity over connectionist units, and the dynamics of these units; at the higher level, the
same system is formally described by symbolic
structures and symbol manipulation. In this pa-
per, w e propose a specific treatment of recur-
sion where complex symbolic operations on re-
cursive structures are mapped to massively par-
allel manipulation of distributed representations
in a connectionist network.
