3 ms·

Absolutely. Look at Pat Langley's BACON program back in the 80's. He didn't work on multiplication per se, but given nothing but "sensory input" it discovered l

by maaku 10y ago

Absolutely. Look at Pat Langley's BACON program back in the 80's. He didn't work on multiplication per se, but given nothing but "sensory input" it discovered laws of planetary motion, rules of physical chemistry, conservation laws, etc.

yequalsx 10y ago
I looked at a summary of his work. I've never heard of him or of the BACON program so my knowledge is essentially zero in this. Looking at summary of his work it doesn't seem to me to qualify either. I'm not sure how to convey the idea in my head to English in such a way to make it clear why I think BACON doesn't qualify as discovering new ideas. I'll try though. From the write up, by Langely, of the program he wrote the program to detect regularity in data and if it found such regularity it would "leap out" to the program so that "it could take appropriate" action. As I understand the program it picks up on any sort of regularity. The program doesn't understand which forms of regularity are important and which are not. The programming system and data it looks at are geared to finding regularity that are meaningful. If the data inputs are vastly widened then it seems to me it would find regularity that wouldn't be considered meaningful. I can imagine the program fixating on a regularity pattern that is meaningless. I hope what I'm writing makes sense. The work he did is interesting and I wonder what advances have been made since then. Let me ask this question. Would a program that looks for regularity discover that in finite probability spaces probability zero events never occur? I think this is something a computer could discover. Could it end up concluding that probability zero events can occur if one looks at uncountable probability measure spaces? It seems to mean that programs will never be able to think or discover things at a meta level. Would a program be able to discover Godel's incompleteness theorem? Of course I don't know the answer. I just suspect that the answer is no. However, humans took thousands of years to discover these things. So perhaps an AI that ran for that long could as well. Thank you for pointing me to the BACON program. I'd never heard of it before.
- maaku 10y ago
  I'm not the one giving you downvotes. I believe you are incorrect, but you have taken the effort to explain your thinking and have the courage to admit that you could be wrong, so I wouldn't down-vote that. In any case, let me flip the question around at you: how did Goedel come up with his incompleteness theorem? Surely it didn't just magically appear in his head? Most likely he followed some standard procedures of mathematical practice: manipulate symbols according to learned rules, look for 'surprising' features in the result, build a sample demonstration of a surprising result, and use intuition regarding its outcome to drive further thinking, etc. You can look at any intellectual behavior and find processes underlying it, unless you want to argue that we don't live in a materialist universe and people have souls. Unless you go down that route, there must be mechanisms to thought, and indeed applied psychology agrees. So if there are mechanism to thought, why can't those run on a computer instead of biology?

by maaku 10y ago

yequalsx 10y ago

I looked at a summary of his work. I've never heard of him or of the BACON program so my knowledge is essentially zero in this. Looking at summary of his work it doesn't seem to me to qualify either. I'm not sure how to convey the idea in my head to English in such a way to make it clear why I think BACON doesn't qualify as discovering new ideas. I'll try though. From the write up, by Langely, of the program he wrote the program to detect regularity in data and if it found such regularity it would "leap out" to the program so that "it could take appropriate" action. As I understand the program it picks up on any sort of regularity. The program doesn't understand which forms of regularity are important and which are not. The programming system and data it looks at are geared to finding regularity that are meaningful. If the data inputs are vastly widened then it seems to me it would find regularity that wouldn't be considered meaningful. I can imagine the program fixating on a regularity pattern that is meaningless. I hope what I'm writing makes sense. The work he did is interesting and I wonder what advances have been made since then. Let me ask this question. Would a program that looks for regularity discover that in finite probability spaces probability zero events never occur? I think this is something a computer could discover. Could it end up concluding that probability zero events can occur if one looks at uncountable probability measure spaces? It seems to mean that programs will never be able to think or discover things at a meta level. Would a program be able to discover Godel's incompleteness theorem? Of course I don't know the answer. I just suspect that the answer is no. However, humans took thousands of years to discover these things. So perhaps an AI that ran for that long could as well. Thank you for pointing me to the BACON program. I'd never heard of it before.

maaku 10y ago
I'm not the one giving you downvotes. I believe you are incorrect, but you have taken the effort to explain your thinking and have the courage to admit that you could be wrong, so I wouldn't down-vote that. In any case, let me flip the question around at you: how did Goedel come up with his incompleteness theorem? Surely it didn't just magically appear in his head? Most likely he followed some standard procedures of mathematical practice: manipulate symbols according to learned rules, look for 'surprising' features in the result, build a sample demonstration of a surprising result, and use intuition regarding its outcome to drive further thinking, etc. You can look at any intellectual behavior and find processes underlying it, unless you want to argue that we don't live in a materialist universe and people have souls. Unless you go down that route, there must be mechanisms to thought, and indeed applied psychology agrees. So if there are mechanism to thought, why can't those run on a computer instead of biology?