2008/12/27 Matt Mahoney <matmaho...@yahoo.com>: > --- On Fri, 12/26/08, Philip Hunt <cabala...@googlemail.com> wrote: > >> > Humans are very good at predicting sequences of >> > symbols, e.g. the next word in a text stream. >> >> Why not have that as your problem domain, instead of text >> compression? > > That's the same thing, isn't it?
Yes and no. What i mean is they may be the same in principle, but I don't think they are in practice. I'll illustrate this by way of an analogy. The Turing Test is considered by many to be a reasonable definition of intelligence. And I'd agree with them -- if a computer can fool sophisticated alert people into thinking it's a human, it's probably at least as clever as a human. Now consider the Loebner Prize. IMO this is a waste of time in terms of advancement of AI because we're not anyway near advanced enough to build a machine that can think as well as a human. So programs that are good at the Loebner prize as so not because they have good AI architectures, but because threy employ clever tricks to fool people. But that's all there is -- clever tricks with no real substance. Consider compression programs. I have several on my computer: zip, compress, bzip2, gzip, etc. These are all quite good at compression (they all seem to work well on Python source code, for example), but there is not real intelligence or understanding behind them -- they are clever tricks with no substance (where by substance I mean intelligence). Now, consider if I build a program that can predict how some sequences will continue. For example, given ABACADAEA it'll predict the next letter is "F", or given: 1 2 4 8 16 32 it'll predict the next number is 64. (Whether the program works on bits, bytes, or longer chunks is a detail, though it might be an important detail.) Even though the program is good at certain types of sequences, it doesn't do compression. For it to do so, I'd have to give it some notation to build a compressed file and then uncompress it again. This is a lot of tedious detail work and doesn't add to it's intelligence. IMO it would just get in the way. -- Philip Hunt, <cabala...@googlemail.com> Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
