On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 8:37 PM, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
> Solving differential equations still requires creativity, and will always > do so > OK fine, but can you find the exact solutions to differential equations better than Mathematica? I don't think so. > Perhaps you mean computing a numerical approximation Computers are better than humans at that too. > I disagree that being a research librarian doesn't take creativity, At one time it took a lot of creativity to be a good research librarian but not anymore, today computers are good at it and creativity is whatever a computer isn't good at. Yet. > I don't think image recognition ever took creativity - it was always > something we're kind of good at for evolutionary reasons. One thing that AI research has taught us is that we were completely wrong about what was inherently easy and what was inherently hard. Telling the difference between a whale and a watermelon takes far more brainpower than solving differential equations, it's just that to our ancestors on the African savanna being good at solving differential equations didn't much increase the likelihood your genes would make it into the next generation, but being good at image recognition did. If you like all human beings could just glance at a differential equation and instantly know what its solutions were with virtually no effort you'd say it required no creativity; but if you had to go down lots of logical dead ends and it took you many hours of deep thought before you were able to tell the difference between a whale and a watermelon you'd say it took great creativity. John K Clark -- 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/d/optout.