Shachar Shemesh wrote:
In other words, this is a case where a human programmer has to analyze the problem, decide on a solution path, decide where, if at all, to apply neural networks, and then program the whole thing.
Compare it to cars or airplanes. They can't work on their own - they need people to build them, and then drive them. But when using them you can go much faster than you can go with your own feet. It's the same with computers. Theoretically, everything you can do with a computer you can also do without it, but it will take you much more time. In many cases, even though programming a task is difficult and takes much time, you can still achieve more by programming something and let the computer do it than by doing it on your own. I don't think neural networks are an exception - they are just a programming tool. But in some cases you can achieve more with neural networks than what you achieve without them. I'll give you a simple example: There are people who can compose good music, but I'm not one of them. By programming a computer, I was able to let the computer compose melodies which are better than what I could compose without the computer. It doesn't mean the computer is smarter than me. It just means I could teach him to do something I can't do on my own. Nadav Har'El wrote:
There's no argument that programming such a thing will take effort. Artifical intelligence doesn't mean some sort of "hey look, it's magic, I'll get a working program without doing any effort!". Rather, the idea that the programmer, while being an expert programmer, does not have to be an expert chess player (to use this example), and the program can "learn" how to play chess by watching the games of grandmasters. There's a division of labor, if you will, by the programmer who can program, and the "teachers" who can play chess extremely well but couldn't program if their life depended on it. To return to the translation issue, the idea that Uri raised was that he wanted to write a translation program, and perhaps spend a good deal of effort doing so, but since he doesn't really know how to translate French to Swedish (for example), he himself cannot teach the program to do that, and he hopes that the program could "pick up that skill" from experts of these languages. By the way, chess is probably not a very good example for this division of labor (programmer vs. teacher), because with the strength of modern computers, even the most naive, brute-force, tree-walking algorithms with the most simplistic heuristic functions, can actually play great chess. A programmer is enough, and you don't even need an expert chess teacher. These sorts of simplistic algorithms makes my Palm Pilot beat me at chess every time, and a stronger computer beat even the best chess player in the world. Now you're probably saying: 'well, chess doesn't actually require intelligence to play, and these programs should not be called "artificial intelligence"'. Kurzweil also points out to this interesting phenomenon, of the drifting definition of "artificial intelligence". He claims that by definition, a computer will never be called "intelligent", because whenever we learn how to do something with a computer, we'll suddenly say that this task does not require intelligence. He gives as examples OCR and speech recognition, tasks once thought to be too "intelligent" for a computer to undertake, but now that computers do them casually we call these tasks un-intelligent, and move our intelligence bar a little higher.
I agree. People tend to think that computers are "machines" and therefore are not intelligent. Personally I think it's not true. I think computers are capable of doing intelligent things, and people are also capable of doing (very) unintelligent things (and vice versa). So it's not a yes/no question whether a person or computer are intelligent. What matters is the action itself. And I think many "intelligent" actions we do can be done, and will be done in the future, by computers. Like playing chess, playing music, composing music, translating, understanding speech, speaking etc. In the future we may even be able to hire computers for many jobs we do now. For example - a secretary. Or maybe even a software programmer! And maybe also a prime minister - I think ANY computer can be smarter than what we have now! :-) Regarding artificial intelligence, you might be interested to read (at least the last few paragraphs) of my summary of the Speedy Composer project (from 6 years ago). It's available in Hebrew and English (I translated it manually): http://www.speedy.co.il/composer/summary.php http://music.speedy.co.il/speedy_composer.php By the way, the issue is not only "intelligence" but also feelings: I believe a computer is even capable of having feelings. Or at least, act as if he has feelings, which is the same. When computers will have emotions, I think it will be a real breakthrough in artificial intelligence. It reminds me some movies I saw, with people (I think Schwarzenegger is one of them) acting as "robots" but smart robots with feelings. I think in the future it will become reality and not science fiction. Best Regards, Uri Even-Chen Speedy Net Raanana, Israel. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: +972-9-7715013 Website: www.uri.co.il -------------------------------------------------------- ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
