On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 7:46 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 10/25/2013 3:24 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >> >> My high-level objection is very simple: chess was an excuse to pursue >> AI. In an era of much lower computational power, people figured that >> for a computer to beat a GM at chess, some meaningful AI would have to >> be developed along the way. I don' thing that Deep Blue is what they >> had in mind. IBM cheated in a way. I do think that Deep Blue is an >> accomplishment, but not_the_ accomplishment we hoped for. > > > Tree search and alpha-beta pruning have very general application so I have > no doubt they are among the many techniques that human brains use.
Agreed, but the word "among" is crucial here. I don't think you will find a part of the brain dedicated to searching min-max trees and doing heuristic pruning. I do believe that if we could reverse engineer the algorithms, we would find that they can operate as search trees in some fuzzy sense. I think this distinction is important. > Also > having a very extensive 'book' memory is something humans use. Sure, but our book appears to be highly associative in a way that we can't really replicate yet on digital computers. And our database is wonderfully unstructured -- smells, phone numbers, distant memories, foreign languages, all meshed together and linked by endless connections. > But the > memorized games and position evaluation are both very specific to chess and > are hard to duplicate in general problem solving. So I think chess programs > did contribute a little to AI. The Mars Rover probably uses decision tree > searches sometimes. Fair enough, in that sense. Notice that I have nothing against decision trees per se. > >> >> I believe there will be an AI renaissance and I hope to be alive to >> witness it. > > > You may be disappointed, or even dismayed. I don't think there's much > reason to expect or even want to create human-like AI. Companions for lonely people. Sex robots. Artificial teachers. Artificial nannies. Who know what else. > That's like the old > idea of achieving flight by attaching wings to people and make them like > birds. Airplanes don't fly like birds. Ok but we want to fly mainly because we want to travel fast. For that it turns out that the best solution is some metal tube with wings and jet engines. For fun, people attach wings to themselves and do it more like birds. Unlike artificial birds, there is probably huge market demand for artificial humans. We can have the ethics debate, but that's another issue. > It may turn out that "real" AI, > intelligence that far exceeds human capabilities, will be more like Deep > Blue than Kasparov. Or, more likely, there is a huge spectrum of possibilities. Your binary suggestion hints at an ideological preference on your part -- I hope you don't mind me saying. Telmo. > Brent > > >> But for this renaissance to take place, I think two >> cultural shifts have to happen: >> >> - A disinterest with the "science as the new religion" stance, leading >> to a truly scientific detachment from findings. Currently, everything >> that touches the creation of intelligence is ideologically loaded from >> all sides of the discussion. This taints honest scientific inquiry; >> >> - New economic structures that allow humanity to pursue complex goals >> outside the narrow short-term focus on profit of corporatism or the >> pointless status wars of academia. >> >> Best, >> Telmo. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
