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I've heard people suggest a comparison between birds wings and planes. We don't understand everything about bird wings. They're incredibly complex and messy bio
by bglazer 11y ago
I've heard people suggest a comparison between birds wings and planes. We don't understand everything about bird wings. They're incredibly complex and messy biological structures. However, we do know enough about the general principles of aerodynamics to build aircraft. Perhaps a similar dynamic is at work here. We don't understand brains, but perhaps neural networks are able to capture the same principles of information processing.
- panic 11y agoYes, plane wings are built on fundamental physical principles. We do not know the fundamental physical principles of intelligence. Building an NN and hoping its brain-like structure will start to think is like building a flapping machine and hoping its bird-like structure will start to fly.
- kanzure 11y ago> Building an NN and hoping its brain-like structure will start to think is like building a flapping machine and hoping its bird-like structure will start to fly. But... you're replying in a comment thread that has explicitly stated that "NNs" don't at all qualify as "brain-like".
- argonaut 11y agoWhich was my response to someone implying we should make them more brain-like. So the comment was quite relevant.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y agoEdsger Dijkstra famously made such a comparison [1]: "The Fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker and Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim." [1] E. W. Dijkstra, EWD898: The threats to computing science