14 ms·

AlphaGo Is Not AI

181 points by henrik_w 10y ago

59nadir 10y ago
The piece really makes the only point worth making in the beginning: > What is AI and what is not AI is, to some extent, a matter of definition. It is by the general and widely used definition that AlphaGo is actually an AI. It just happens to solve one very specific problem very well, making it a weak AI. > Again, the rapid advances of deep learning and the recent success of this kind of AI at games like Go are very good news because they could lead to lots of really useful applications in medical research, industry, environmental preservation, and many other areas. But this is only one part of the problem, as I’ve tried to show here. I don’t believe deep learning is the silver bullet that will get us to true AI, in the sense of a machine that is able to learn to live in the world, interact naturally with us, understand deeply the complexity of our emotions and cultural biases, and ultimately help us to make a better world. The piece was written at a time when the world was much more interested in what AlphaGo was doing and once again people were perhaps getting too excited about AI, but it really doesn't hold much value today. It may have been good to extinguish some of the misguided enthusiasm people were exhibiting back then, but no one is even talking about AlphaGo at the moment and there is little to no value in discussing what it means for strong AI anymore.
- platz 10y ago
  When some people say "AI" what they really mean is "Strong AI"
  - kowdermeister 10y ago
    I'm some people and what I mean by AI is artificial intelligence. If needed I can be more precise with Weak / Strong / AGI or ASI.
    - platz 10y ago
      So now you speak for everyone, and define their language usage independent of their intended connotations? Quite presumptuous.
    - kgwgk 10y ago
      You are some other people, then.
  - fossuser 10y ago
    I think people think of it more along the lines of an artificial consciousness. Which since consciousness is likely an emerging property of our own biological neural net and training data/weights, would likely have similar issues that humans have when exposed to bad data while growing up.
    - platz 10y ago
      > our own biological neural net and training data/weights Well that shoots down my "minds are made of mechanical internal drives/pistons/levers" theory.
- pron 10y ago
  What's a "weak AI"? Does any algorithm that is able to adapt its behavior by learning qualify as "weak AI"? If so, why call it AI at all?
  - habitue 10y ago
    Yeah, exactly. We call it AI because we need a name for this kind of adaptive algorithm, even if it isn't anything close to strong AI
    - pron 10y ago
      There are JIT compilers, and even sorting algorithms that are adaptive. Are they AI too? What's wrong with the name "statistical learning" (as that's the flavor du jour of so called AI anyway)?
      - legolas2412 10y ago
        I think the word "adaptive" is meant to mean "general" learning that can be applied to more behavior. AlphaGo was trained for blackgammon, could it be given chess and learn it just as well? The answer is no. If I had to personally define AI, I would give a machine input to limbs of robot, and output of cameras and microphones (eyes and ears). And I would see if given sufficient years, can it learn language and conversation and ability to use robotic body for sports.
  - didibus 10y ago
    "the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior" That's what I would define as weak AI. So yes, even algorithms which do not adapt their behaviors by learning, but can imitate intelligent human behavior to some extent would be weak AI, such as AI in video games. Now strong AI would be: "the capability of a machine to originate intelligent human behavior" This means the intelligent behavior would originate from the machine itself. Some Machine Learning algorithms exhibit strong AI, in that they find ways to even outperform a human, by themselves, through the learning process. Sometimes, we can't even understand why it chose to do what it did, but it appeared to be even more intelligent than what most human would have chosen to do themselves. Now Artificial General Intelligence, or sometimes called strong AI also, but I think there needs to be a distinction as I explain before. This would be: "the capability of a machine to originate any intelligent human behavior" The reason a lot of people are talking about true AI, AGI, strong AI, etc. today, is because Machine Learning is seen as the be all, end all of AI. Yet practitioners and scientists know that it is not, at least in its current form. Currently, it can solve simple decision tasks, probably the kind of decisions a person makes in under a second or two, like driving. But it does not solve them generally, so a person must train different models for each tasks. At the same time, having a way to automate decision making of a single simple task is huge in terms of potential. There's so many things we can automate through this, and if we combine them, you can create even more complex autonomous machines. That's why people are excited. Though I understand that it is not as awesome as having found general AI, or AI which can make complex decisions. The dream of AI continues, but the practicality of it are closer then ever.
- CJefferson 10y ago
  Speaking as an AI researcher, almost nothing is "AI" research. In practice i feel most current AI research falls into two categories: * Fuzzy problems -- image, sound and free text recognition. Where there is no real "true answer". * Problems too hard to solve in a reasonable time without heuristics -- SAT, scheduling, etc. In practice NP-hard problems and further up the complexity heirachy -- AlphaGo goes here. Once we know how to do something reliably, it stops being AI and just becomes "an algorithm" :)
  - chii 10y ago
    is there any research into making a "generic" AI that can solve any problem without the researcher first having to know what that problem is? i.e., human style learning.
    - CJefferson 10y ago
      Certainly some very clever people are trying it, and have been since the 60s at least, but as far as i am aware the progress is limited (but it is not my area of expertise). I think the main problem is you end up needing a language to describe the problem, and that ends up limiting the problems that can be solved, or you have to explain so carefully what the problem is it feels like cheating.
      - prance 10y ago
        As a researcher in multiagent systems, I know this problem very well. Which is, I believe, exactly the point the article makes. But it goes on to say that this might be possible to overcome by embodiment and developmental psychology. Not new arguments for sure, but valid ones, and brought at the right time (a year ago) of a new AI hype.
    - halflings 10y ago
      Machine learning algorithms can solve many problems without knowing what they really are, only given examples (sometimes even without labels when unsupervised learning applies). We are still quite far from anything we could call "human-style learning" though, but definitely getting there (just look at all the recent publications with reinforcement learning and elaborate ways to use memory in neural nets).
- dkarl 10y ago
  > It is by the general and widely used definition that AlphaGo is actually an AI. Only for a little while. AI is how we describe new technology that does something we think of as requiring human intelligence. AI, like the word "technology" itself, is a term we use during the lag between creating something and learning to take it for granted. I don't foresee an end to technological development, but I do think eventually there will be no AI, because our ability to intuitively appreciate intelligence doesn't much surpass our own. Beyond some point we will stop perceiving new technological capabilities as higher levels of intelligence. There will be people, computers, appliances, services not tied to individual machines, and genetically engineered rabbit tutors for our children, and nobody will be surprised to encounter intelligence anywhere, least of all in a computer.
- rocqua 10y ago
  No, that is totally ignoring the point of the article due to it's semantics. The point the article makes is that a general intelligence (or however you wanna call something that has intelligent function like a human) is not attained by AlphaGo. It might help but it is only part of the puzzle. There is work needed in other directions.
mafribe 10y ago
One of the co-founders of DeepMind (Shane Legg) has provided the following definition of intelligence: "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments" in [1]. This definition has been pretty influential, and in the sense of this definition, AlphaGo is not AI. But it is a great step towards AI. [1] S. Legg, M. Hutter, Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence. https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329 https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329
- pron 10y ago
  > Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments A tardigrade achieves its goals in a wide range of environments; I don't think anyone would call it intelligent. I've known quite a few 15-year-old juvenile delinquents that I'm certain were able to achieve their goals in a much wider range of environments than Albert Einstein; were they all much more intelligent than Einstein? > But it is a great step towards AI. How do you know how big a step it is? None of our learning algorithms has yet to achieve even an insect's level of intelligence (which would be normally considered zero or close to it). How do you know we're even on the right path? I mean, I have no real reason to doubt that we'll get AI sometime in the future, but the belief -- certainty even -- that AI is imminent has been with us for about sixty years now.
  - joepanda 10y ago
    I would absolutely classify a tardigrade as an intelligent system. Systems of parts interacting in an intelligent way applies to more than just networks of nerve cells.
    - pron 10y ago
      You've made a circular definition. And I wasn't claiming that only nerve cells can form intelligence, but I think that if we expand the definition beyond what people normally call intelligent, then we should be more precise than the vague "ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments" or else every complex adaptive system would be called intelligent, in which case we can drop that name because we already have one: complex adaptive systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system)
nullc 10y ago
Good to know that quadriplegics are not intelligent, much less sentient.
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't make a point this way on HN.
saosebastiao 10y ago
This whole post can be (unintentionally) TL;DRed by a single Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect The phenomenon of people discounting significant advances as "not AI" is not new. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten old yet.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  Desktop link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- lucb1e 10y ago
  > The phenomenon of people discounting significant advances as "not AI" is not new. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten old yet. It hasn't gotten old because people keep calling non-AI AI. I have so far refrained from correcting people because I see it like the word "hacker", which on Hacker News is widely understood in its correct meaning, but is commonly used to refer to computer criminals. I've given up long ago on correcting people to use the word "crackers" rather than "hackers". But since it has been brought up... Artificial Intelligence refers to something that behaves intelligently and can adapt to new situations. I don't think human brains are magic or divine (I was surprised to learn this is not a universal opinion), so in that sense we're all "just a computation". In that sense the simplest pocket calculator is a thinking machine since it can take an almost infinite number of inputs and respond to it logically. But everyone with (artificial) intelligence understands that this is not what is meant by artificial intelligence. The article that you link claims that every major advance is referred to as "just a computation", but I doubt that people will claim AI is "just a computation" once a computer learns to speak and can have a real conversation at the level of a 3 year old or something.
  - EliRivers 10y ago
    like the word "hacker", which on Hacker News is widely understood in its correct meaning You'd be surprised. Here's part of just such a conversation for a couple of years ago; I've always thought "hacker" without qualifiers meant "person who can code" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9790316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9790316 Other terms commonly used here with wildly different meanings being applied include "liberal", "feminism" and "capitalism". Screaming matches abound... :)
CharlesW 10y ago
I guess that makes AlphaGo an AIdiot savant?
gsam 10y ago
In my view, part of the fundamental problem of current AI approaches for tackling general intelligence is the inability to collate and organize different systems and algorithms together in a coherent manner. To use a flawed but useful mode of thinking: we've succeeded at codifying crystallized intelligent systems (far beyond human means), we've made some progress on fluid intelligent systems (at worst random search), but we have not managed to make any progress on the mediator of the two. We can build a million different single purpose neural networks, but we have so few meta-classifiers for knowing which network to use at which time (and can also change track their own self-modification). Watson is possibly the closest we have at this time, but it seems to work on static information which it cannot update or improve on itself.
chejazi 10y ago
OK, so we have AIs that are capable of solving a very specific problem. My questions is, are AI's capable of being composed? In the sense that if I have 1000 AIs that are each experts at performing their domain specific tasks, can one or more AIs be built on top of them that specialize almost exclusively in delegation? i.e. they delegate intelligently depending on the task at hand. If that's possible, then we could in theory build a generalized AI, right?
- gsam 10y ago
  A simple decision tree could suffice. Is it a speech problem, is it an image problem? Is it a classification problem? Failing to find an acceptable answer, it does what seems closest or makes a random but plausible decision. This doesn't seem too far from what humans would be doing. Part of the problem is the meta-recognition of the problem and how to organize that within an actual system.
- gus_massa 10y ago
  It's not good to abuse of the analogies, but the human brain have to spend more time in task with conflicting information, for example to read the word "yellow" when it's written with blue ink, ... More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect
S4M 10y ago
relevant: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160329-why-alphago-is-really-such-a-big-deal/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160329-why-alphago-is-reall...
suprfnk 10y ago
Offtopic, but why do people design websites this [1] way? The content isn't even a fourth of the page width, then the rest of the page is filled with random articles, newsletter signup and follow buttons. The topic sounds interesting, but the presentation is incredibly off-putting. 1: http://i.imgur.com/Obxuj9A.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Obxuj9A.jpg
qeternity 10y ago
I really don't understand why all this pedantic squabbling over terminology. Nobody has suggested that AlphaGo is AGI or human-level intelligence. But it is intelligent. Just like in humans or any other organism, intelligence is a spectrum. Artificial intelligence is no different. I think even the laymen understands that AlphaGo is not a sentient being inside a computer, just like people understood the same about DeepBlue.
- flashman 10y ago
  > intelligence is a spectrum To me, saying algorithms are on the intelligence spectrum is like saying the weather report is on the humour spectrum. It's true but ultimately meaningless, because neither algorithms nor the weather report exhibit the interesting properties of those spectrums.
parenthephobia 10y ago
One problem with defining what is and isn't AI in the current age is that as something approaching "real" AI - rather than Hollywood AI - enters the public consciousness, it is seized upon by marketers wanting to attach the new buzzword to their products, effectively diluting the term in the process. Things that a decade ago would have been described as performing regression analysis, and just last year doing machine learning, may be described this year as being powered by AI.
ucaetano 10y ago
Title: "Why AlphaGo Is Not AI" Actual argument: "Is [AlphaGo] going to get us to full AI, in the sense of an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, machine? Not quite" Conclusion: "the rapid advances of deep learning and the recent success of this kind of AI at games like Go" So not only the article discusses something different from the headline, it directly contradicts the headline by calling AlphaGo a type of AI. Bad journalism.
itchyjunk 10y ago
If a chimp could play the game of go at the same level as humans, would we say the chimp had intelligence? When you base your definition of intelligence on sample size of 1 (humans), but can't even define within that context, you get these kinds of problems. Is platypus a mammal or not? Does the classification change the function? Are all humans intelligent or posses natural intelligence? Is there a degree of intelligence? i.e. are some humans in possession of more intelligence than others? I look at artificial intelligence as an umbrella term which has varying meaning depending on context. If you classify a task as needing intelligence to solve and someone finds a piece of code to do it, you have an artificial intelligence there. You can keep moving the goal post but it's only nuances and definition.
- mannykannot 10y ago
  There are problems where humans need to use intelligence, but which are amenable to brute-force computing - chess is an example - and that does not, in my view, make brute-force computing class as intelligence. It does not accord with what the term AI originally meant, and the first moving of the goal post was to apply it to these cases.
adzm 10y ago
Relevant Hofstadter quote: > Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.
bsaul 10y ago
I don't understand the critics this article receive here. It makes a very good counterpoint to all the hype the AI field is living at the moment, letting people from the general audience believe that algorithms will replace humans quite soon. You may think it doesn't matter, but we've candidates to the presidential elections here in france building economical programs assuming "robots will do everything soon, so let's provide everybody with a universal revenue" as a likely immediate future. It is extremely healthy to let people understand all we've been able to build so far are number crunching machines, which absolutely don't give any kind of meaning to the numbers they see passing by. Meaning as : i see what this number represents, and the consequences it has in real people's context.
- visarga 10y ago
  > all we've been able to build so far are number crunching machines, which absolutely don't give any kind of meaning to the numbers they see passing by All humans are just protein factories, which don't have any meaning other than electrical pulses and chemical reactions.
  - gattilorenz 10y ago
    Apart from the fact that the OP was talking about giving meaning (Chinese room, anyone?), not having meaning, I think that too is up for debate. For sure there's no clear, agreed, universal meaning, and most likely it does not have a meaning to you. Not everyone thinks like that, though. edit: [OT] "have a meaning to you" or "for you"? I have the impression that there's a slightly different interpretation, and one might be offensive (not intended). Or are they the same?
- mannykannot 10y ago
  If the mind is that what a physical brain does, then a physical brain can in principle be simulated - by crunching numbers - to produce a mind (some have claimed that there must be more to it than that, but none have come up with a generally-accepted justification for their position.)
  - 10y ago
rocqua 10y ago
> Culture is the essential catalyst of intelligence I liked the article on many fronts and thought it tried to justify most of its claims. However, the quoted claim goes unsupported. Does anyone know of justifications for the quoted claim?
empath75 10y ago
In a hundred years, google is going to be arguing with Facebook about whether humans are intelligent.
PunchTornado 10y ago
this is one of those clickbaiting articles: - taylor swift is not really an artist - paulo coehlo is not really a writer - javascript is not really programming - Trump is not really human
m3kw9 10y ago
This is a pointless argument, we all know AI is all about thought. If a person can't move does he still have intelligence?
- notahacker 10y ago
  Whilst I don't like the author's way of phrasing interaction with real world information as "fundamentally tied to robotics", humans whose range of movement is restricted to scrunching up one cheek have won Nobel prizes because even with their physiological limitations they've still had access to and assimilated information vastly more complex and unstructured than board positions for the game of Go in order to be able to devise their own considerably more complex and varied end goals and means of communication to reach them. Whilst a computer which can choose hundred of legal Go positions at each turn might actually have more output channels than Stephen Hawking, it hasn't had and doesn't have the range of inputs to be in a position to contemplate alternative end goals such as dictating books on theoretical physics or ordering a cheeseburger (let alone the ability to learn how to be understood by sympathetic non-computers enough to overcome its physical limitations) One can turn it around: if an organism has no means of assessing or communicating with the outside world bar the ability to send and receive electrical signals so simple they can be mapped to the game of Go and whose survival to the next generation depends on electrical signals combining in various rare patterns hardcoded into its DNA (which could be mapped to the win conditions for the game of Go), would we even consider the possibility of such an organism being intelligent simply because its route to achieving those patterns was incomprehensible to and could not be deactivated by counter-stimuli from the humans that studied it? Would such a theoretical organism even need to be composed of more than one cell?
vonnik 10y ago
The headline for this piece is clickbait. AlphaGo is AI, it's just not strong AI. No AI is strong AI for the moment, but that doesn't mean that the AI we have is uninteresting or a dead end, as the author seems to think. The author and his editors deliberately conflate the two terms in the headline, and clarify after about a paragraph. Sure, AlphaGo is not strong AI. And Abraham Lincoln is dead. And there are lots of other things everyone knows that don't deserve to be in the news. Jean-Christophe Baillie wrote this piece. He has done some work in AI and computer vision, and he had the opportunity here to write a piece that reflected that expertise. Instead he made a rather facile point that is similar to saying "Graffiti isn't art." That argument won't lead anywhere interesting. He rehashes the Chomsky-ian argument about meaning. That AI's won't understand meaning until they can connect representations to the world. Then he makes the point that this requires embodiment, that they have a physical body in space through which they connect to the world. I don't believe either of these are necessary requirements for AI. An AI that solves a lot of problems better than humans, and transfers that learning across many problems with relative ease, is getting close to strong AI. It doesn't really matter whether the machine constructs meaning to itself or not. It doesn't have to be humanlike to be strong. Secondly, AIs can train perfectly well in virtual environments. They don't have to be embodied as robots to be considered strong. We can model the world with enough complexity to give AIs problems that, if solved, might define them as strong.
- halflings 10y ago
  RE:the embodiment/robotics argument, notice that he has a vested interest in this field: > Several research labs are now trying to go further into acquiring grammar, gestures, and more complex cultural conventions using this approach, in particular the AI Lab that I founded at Aldebaran, the French robotics company—now part of the SoftBank Group.
- partycoder 10y ago
  Very disappointing article indeed. Alpha Go is an AI project with historical relevance, that had a well specified and measurable goal, which is beating humans in a game that requires to develop an intuition for moves rather than just reading moves in advance. Having said that I don't understand what's the point of trying to delegitimize the significance of Alpha Go. Implementing what we call "intuition" is not a minor thing. In contrast, I encountered the Pepper robot in a mall in SF. It was almost impossible to interact with it, so if there is going to be a critique, why not starting from one of his own projects.
RandyRanderson 10y ago
IMO there are only 2 problems in machine learning (ML): 1 Regression - Given a set of vector pairs Xi and Yi, find a function that maps each Xi to Yi minimizing some objective function. 2 Path Finding - Given some topology (typically on some regression output) find the "best" path, given some objective function. All other problems (classification, clustering, etc) can be reposed as a combination of these two. Viewed in this way, an "AI" system set on any reasonable test of intelligence would score super-human (defined against the average adult human) with the current set of algos, with one caveat. If we think of operating systems in say the 90s we would mostly agree that few innovations (evolutions as opposed to revolutions) have occurred when compared to the OSs we have today. It's the development, integration, testing, tools, hardware support, etc that have taken all this time. So, to the article's point, the AlphaGo system does these 2 things pretty well just as Windows95 did things pretty well. Yet even today I have to restart my computer every time there is the most trivial of updates. TL;DR Super human Audio/Visual/NLP ML == AI is both here now and a long way off. One could probably cut this to one but stating it would be very convoluted. Also "pathing" problems are typically non-convex and real-time whereas regression problems are typically not.
inventtheday 10y ago
Its more like AlphaGo is a PIECE of strong AI. Deep learning, as its implemented today, is probably not the secret sauce of consciousness, but it is a powerful and useful subsystem. In that sense, it is a tangible step towards the eventual goal of general strong AI.
didibus 10y ago
This is how I see it: If the machine comes up with the decision making logic, it's AI, if it does not, it's not AI. A sorting algorithm, in most cases, is a description of the logic to decide how to proceed at each step to accomplish the task of sorting. The computer merely executes that logic for us very very quickly. On the other hand, self driving machine learning algorithms come up with the logic of how to base the decision of when to steer left/right, to what degree, when to accelerate and decelerate, to what degree, all by themselves. Often time, we can't even formalize the logic they use, we can only test to see how well it performs. This is AI. The computer originated intelligence, it did not simply execute it. Within that, there is a spectrum which even human exhibit. I cannot come up with logic to solve all tasks. For most tasks, I would need a good teacher and a lot of practice before I can find on my own logic that can solve a task, even so slightly, depending on the difficulty of the task at hand. I'd say there's only one exception to this rule. Sometimes it is useful to call something which appears intelligent AI. Like in most video games, the computer is actually simply executing the logic a programmer told it about, but to most players, you will believe as if it is coming up with it on its own. Most often, it does not and did not, a programmer came up with it, but you're fooled into thinking otherwise, and the computer appears sentient. This is not true intelligence, but being able to use logic to make decision, even if that logic did not originate from you, is probably a part of intelligence. In a sense, if I could program a machine to perform all tasks, even though it uses the logic that I came up with, that machine would appear quite useful. It would only fail when encountering a task it has never seen, or a condition in a task that's not accounted for in my logic. Machine learning would not fail at those, in that, it could re-learn from the new condition, and come up with a different way to solve the task.
wglb 10y ago
How old is the debate about what is really AI? A program called _Chess_ written in 1970s by Larry Atkin and David Slate at Northwestern did manage to win one game from David Levy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_(Northwestern_University) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_(Northwestern_University... Atkin often complained about the characterization of their program being AI, saying (paraphrasing here) "It isn't AI. It is just good software engineering."
sgt101 10y ago
Margaret Boden made these points previously. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/276 http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/276 A fun alternative strand in AI research driven by these thoughts (I think) is typified by Rosie. Rosie is the proper job. http://soar.eecs.umich.edu/articles/articles/videos-rosie http://soar.eecs.umich.edu/articles/articles/videos-rosie There is an unseemly comment in this thread that alludes to a genuine issue with the embodied AI arguement. People with other bodies are not lesser intelligences than those who have a socially cast "typical" body or sensors. And given that one has to question this line of reasoning. The answer is that intelligence is embodied outside and beyond your physical being - it's your body, your family, your tribe and so on. I find the philosophy difficult, but to prove that there is something in this view you need to hike out to a wood somewhere and spend a couple of weeks by yourself. Things happen and who you are changes (did for me) cut yourself off or be cut off and you are as less human (autonomous cognitive agent) as one can become.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
While I acccept Alpha Go as 'real AI' (I watched the match with Lee in realtime, and years ago I wrote and marketed my Go playing program 'Honninbo Warrior') I agree that Alpha Go is not a general purpose AI. Deep learning has been personally career/interests changing, but I still think that we should be building hybrid neural network / symbolic AI systems.
ganfortran 10y ago
BS. It is AI that this AI can only play Go.
intrasight 10y ago
Defining AI is hard - we can agree on that. I think the best definitions are in the form of tests that match the performance against organisms that have developed intelligence through millions of years of evolution. The Turning Test is a good example of this. I think that we can all agree that an AI that passes the Turing Test is intelligent. But that is the final goal post. What about intermediate milestones? My opinion is that games just don't count. I think that creating similar test as milestones would do more to progress the AI field. Like the Turning Test, it must test that parity with another intelligent being is achieved. Intelligence is a spectrum from "not very" to "omniscient". What are some organisms that are closer to the "not very" end of this spectrum that would be good candidates for parity tests? How would a parity test be performed? It is in answering that question that one arrives at “There is no AI without robotics”. If you want to demonstrate that your artificial cockroach is as intelligent as the real thing, then you have to build a robot. It doesn't have to be a physical robot as long as you have a simulator that can do a very accurate simulations of the physics of the environment, the AI candidate, and their interactions. That's not so easy, which is why many if not most researchers build physical robots. Would a cockroach be a good first milestone? Too complex? How about a worm? Achieved parity with cockroach? Then move on to Jumping Spiders. When your great-grandchildren achieve that parity, my great-grandchildren will certainly celebrate with them.
happycube 10y ago
There's an old AI Winter saying: "If it works, it's not AI" ;)
dbcurtis 10y ago
AlphaGo is not AI in exactly the same way that Aldebaran robots are not robots. Seriously, what do those robots do? They are just one step above Disneyland's pre-programmed animatronics. If this dude wants me to take him seriously, he needs to show me a robot that solves a problem for somebody. Nao is just a waste of perfectly good servos. Or, alternatively, if he insists that Nao is a robot, then I think AlphaGo can be considered AI. People have been saying "___ is not AI" since Claude Shannon built a robot mouse to solve a maze. Then Shannon's chess playing program was "not AI". Humbug.
- unityByFreedom 10y ago
  > People have been saying "___ is not AI" since Claude Shannon built a robot mouse to solve a maze. Then Shannon's chess playing program was "not AI". Humbug. AI researchers say this because they don't want the hype to lead investors putting money in the wrong places, which could cause another AI winter. OpenAI is one example. Fortunately, that's a non-profit. If it were profit seeking and they had a large investment that went belly up, it might cause the industry to tank. That bust will probably happen again in the future. The "scrooges" are just trying to forestall it.
quantum_state 10y ago
It wud be beneficial to take a pramagtic approach ... AI or not ... as long as the end product helps human conditions ... we just use ... similar debates happened so many times in the past ... there is really no point to divert the attention ... for the people who know, it is clear the title is a click bait ... for the people who don't know .. they find out this anyway after they click ..
dllthomas 10y ago
Of course it's not really AI; it works.
visarga 10y ago
> AlphaGo Is Not AI And the questioning article is not real writing. It fails to the standards of "real writing" that I uphold. A real article doesn't come with a clickbait title, and is better documented. I don't think the author knows what he's talking about - instead, just expressing incredulity based off his gut feelings.
powerapple 10y ago
are "we" the result of hardcoded DNA or the result of learning? Our objective of survival is kind of hardcoded objective we optimize our life on. Why do we care about if we can build another "intelligence" similar to ours? Why not just build something good at jobs we don't want to do, and leave "culture" to us. I strongly believe a higher being will laugh to see we call ourself intelligent the same way we see artificial intelligence.
digitalshankar 10y ago
AlphaGo is an AI, author of this article thinks AI to understand itself and code itself and have sex then reproduce, WTF? AI is Technology and not Biology. AI and Human Brain are not the same. This is like saying AI to take birth by itself without human programming it.
deleted 10y ago
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paradite 10y ago
Regarding the definition of AI, I find lecture notes for intro to AI courses in various university [1] very useful: > Views of AI fall into four categories: > Thinking humanly - Cognitive Modeling > Thinking rationally - “Laws of Thought” > Acting humanly - Turing Test > Acting rationally - Rational Agent > The textbook advocates "acting rationally" Indeed most of the things we see today in AI community is solving the problem of "acting rationally" whereas the other categories have their respective fields (Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Philosophy) that are no longer closely related to computer science. [1] http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~hzhang/c145/notes/m1-intro-6p.pdf http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~hzhang/c145/notes/m1-intro-6p....
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  I would say that if your paradigm for studying thought cannot explain away at least two of the other three, you've got it wrong. A good theory in cognitive modeling ought to have applications to all the rest. A good theory of acting rationally ought to have applications to acting humanly or thinking rationally, and ideally to thinking humanly as well.

181 points by henrik_w 10y ago

The piece really makes the only point worth making in the beginning: > What is AI and what is not AI is, to some extent, a matter of definition. It is by the general and widely used definition that AlphaGo is actually an AI. It just happens to solve one very specific problem very well, making it a weak AI. > Again, the rapid advances of deep learning and the recent success of this kind of AI at games like Go are very good news because they could lead to lots of really useful applications in medical research, industry, environmental preservation, and many other areas. But this is only one part of the problem, as I’ve tried to show here. I don’t believe deep learning is the silver bullet that will get us to true AI, in the sense of a machine that is able to learn to live in the world, interact naturally with us, understand deeply the complexity of our emotions and cultural biases, and ultimately help us to make a better world. The piece was written at a time when the world was much more interested in what AlphaGo was doing and once again people were perhaps getting too excited about AI, but it really doesn't hold much value today. It may have been good to extinguish some of the misguided enthusiasm people were exhibiting back then, but no one is even talking about AlphaGo at the moment and there is little to no value in discussing what it means for strong AI anymore.

platz 10y ago
When some people say "AI" what they really mean is "Strong AI"
- kowdermeister 10y ago
  I'm some people and what I mean by AI is artificial intelligence. If needed I can be more precise with Weak / Strong / AGI or ASI.
  - platz 10y ago
    So now you speak for everyone, and define their language usage independent of their intended connotations? Quite presumptuous.
  - kgwgk 10y ago
    You are some other people, then.
- fossuser 10y ago
  I think people think of it more along the lines of an artificial consciousness. Which since consciousness is likely an emerging property of our own biological neural net and training data/weights, would likely have similar issues that humans have when exposed to bad data while growing up.
  - platz 10y ago
    > our own biological neural net and training data/weights Well that shoots down my "minds are made of mechanical internal drives/pistons/levers" theory.
pron 10y ago
What's a "weak AI"? Does any algorithm that is able to adapt its behavior by learning qualify as "weak AI"? If so, why call it AI at all?
- habitue 10y ago
  Yeah, exactly. We call it AI because we need a name for this kind of adaptive algorithm, even if it isn't anything close to strong AI
  - pron 10y ago
    There are JIT compilers, and even sorting algorithms that are adaptive. Are they AI too? What's wrong with the name "statistical learning" (as that's the flavor du jour of so called AI anyway)?
    - legolas2412 10y ago
      I think the word "adaptive" is meant to mean "general" learning that can be applied to more behavior. AlphaGo was trained for blackgammon, could it be given chess and learn it just as well? The answer is no. If I had to personally define AI, I would give a machine input to limbs of robot, and output of cameras and microphones (eyes and ears). And I would see if given sufficient years, can it learn language and conversation and ability to use robotic body for sports.
- didibus 10y ago
  "the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior" That's what I would define as weak AI. So yes, even algorithms which do not adapt their behaviors by learning, but can imitate intelligent human behavior to some extent would be weak AI, such as AI in video games. Now strong AI would be: "the capability of a machine to originate intelligent human behavior" This means the intelligent behavior would originate from the machine itself. Some Machine Learning algorithms exhibit strong AI, in that they find ways to even outperform a human, by themselves, through the learning process. Sometimes, we can't even understand why it chose to do what it did, but it appeared to be even more intelligent than what most human would have chosen to do themselves. Now Artificial General Intelligence, or sometimes called strong AI also, but I think there needs to be a distinction as I explain before. This would be: "the capability of a machine to originate any intelligent human behavior" The reason a lot of people are talking about true AI, AGI, strong AI, etc. today, is because Machine Learning is seen as the be all, end all of AI. Yet practitioners and scientists know that it is not, at least in its current form. Currently, it can solve simple decision tasks, probably the kind of decisions a person makes in under a second or two, like driving. But it does not solve them generally, so a person must train different models for each tasks. At the same time, having a way to automate decision making of a single simple task is huge in terms of potential. There's so many things we can automate through this, and if we combine them, you can create even more complex autonomous machines. That's why people are excited. Though I understand that it is not as awesome as having found general AI, or AI which can make complex decisions. The dream of AI continues, but the practicality of it are closer then ever.
CJefferson 10y ago
Speaking as an AI researcher, almost nothing is "AI" research. In practice i feel most current AI research falls into two categories: * Fuzzy problems -- image, sound and free text recognition. Where there is no real "true answer". * Problems too hard to solve in a reasonable time without heuristics -- SAT, scheduling, etc. In practice NP-hard problems and further up the complexity heirachy -- AlphaGo goes here. Once we know how to do something reliably, it stops being AI and just becomes "an algorithm" :)
- chii 10y ago
  is there any research into making a "generic" AI that can solve any problem without the researcher first having to know what that problem is? i.e., human style learning.
  - CJefferson 10y ago
    Certainly some very clever people are trying it, and have been since the 60s at least, but as far as i am aware the progress is limited (but it is not my area of expertise). I think the main problem is you end up needing a language to describe the problem, and that ends up limiting the problems that can be solved, or you have to explain so carefully what the problem is it feels like cheating.
    - prance 10y ago
      As a researcher in multiagent systems, I know this problem very well. Which is, I believe, exactly the point the article makes. But it goes on to say that this might be possible to overcome by embodiment and developmental psychology. Not new arguments for sure, but valid ones, and brought at the right time (a year ago) of a new AI hype.
  - halflings 10y ago
    Machine learning algorithms can solve many problems without knowing what they really are, only given examples (sometimes even without labels when unsupervised learning applies). We are still quite far from anything we could call "human-style learning" though, but definitely getting there (just look at all the recent publications with reinforcement learning and elaborate ways to use memory in neural nets).
dkarl 10y ago
> It is by the general and widely used definition that AlphaGo is actually an AI. Only for a little while. AI is how we describe new technology that does something we think of as requiring human intelligence. AI, like the word "technology" itself, is a term we use during the lag between creating something and learning to take it for granted. I don't foresee an end to technological development, but I do think eventually there will be no AI, because our ability to intuitively appreciate intelligence doesn't much surpass our own. Beyond some point we will stop perceiving new technological capabilities as higher levels of intelligence. There will be people, computers, appliances, services not tied to individual machines, and genetically engineered rabbit tutors for our children, and nobody will be surprised to encounter intelligence anywhere, least of all in a computer.
rocqua 10y ago
No, that is totally ignoring the point of the article due to it's semantics. The point the article makes is that a general intelligence (or however you wanna call something that has intelligent function like a human) is not attained by AlphaGo. It might help but it is only part of the puzzle. There is work needed in other directions.

mafribe 10y ago

One of the co-founders of DeepMind (Shane Legg) has provided the following definition of intelligence: "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments" in [1]. This definition has been pretty influential, and in the sense of this definition, AlphaGo is not AI. But it is a great step towards AI. [1] S. Legg, M. Hutter, Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence. https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329 https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329

pron 10y ago
> Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments A tardigrade achieves its goals in a wide range of environments; I don't think anyone would call it intelligent. I've known quite a few 15-year-old juvenile delinquents that I'm certain were able to achieve their goals in a much wider range of environments than Albert Einstein; were they all much more intelligent than Einstein? > But it is a great step towards AI. How do you know how big a step it is? None of our learning algorithms has yet to achieve even an insect's level of intelligence (which would be normally considered zero or close to it). How do you know we're even on the right path? I mean, I have no real reason to doubt that we'll get AI sometime in the future, but the belief -- certainty even -- that AI is imminent has been with us for about sixty years now.
- joepanda 10y ago
  I would absolutely classify a tardigrade as an intelligent system. Systems of parts interacting in an intelligent way applies to more than just networks of nerve cells.
  - pron 10y ago
    You've made a circular definition. And I wasn't claiming that only nerve cells can form intelligence, but I think that if we expand the definition beyond what people normally call intelligent, then we should be more precise than the vague "ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments" or else every complex adaptive system would be called intelligent, in which case we can drop that name because we already have one: complex adaptive systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system)

nullc 10y ago

Good to know that quadriplegics are not intelligent, much less sentient.

dang 10y ago
Please don't make a point this way on HN.

saosebastiao 10y ago

This whole post can be (unintentionally) TL;DRed by a single Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect The phenomenon of people discounting significant advances as "not AI" is not new. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten old yet.

lucb1e 10y ago
Desktop link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
lucb1e 10y ago
> The phenomenon of people discounting significant advances as "not AI" is not new. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten old yet. It hasn't gotten old because people keep calling non-AI AI. I have so far refrained from correcting people because I see it like the word "hacker", which on Hacker News is widely understood in its correct meaning, but is commonly used to refer to computer criminals. I've given up long ago on correcting people to use the word "crackers" rather than "hackers". But since it has been brought up... Artificial Intelligence refers to something that behaves intelligently and can adapt to new situations. I don't think human brains are magic or divine (I was surprised to learn this is not a universal opinion), so in that sense we're all "just a computation". In that sense the simplest pocket calculator is a thinking machine since it can take an almost infinite number of inputs and respond to it logically. But everyone with (artificial) intelligence understands that this is not what is meant by artificial intelligence. The article that you link claims that every major advance is referred to as "just a computation", but I doubt that people will claim AI is "just a computation" once a computer learns to speak and can have a real conversation at the level of a 3 year old or something.
- EliRivers 10y ago
  like the word "hacker", which on Hacker News is widely understood in its correct meaning You'd be surprised. Here's part of just such a conversation for a couple of years ago; I've always thought "hacker" without qualifiers meant "person who can code" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9790316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9790316 Other terms commonly used here with wildly different meanings being applied include "liberal", "feminism" and "capitalism". Screaming matches abound... :)

CharlesW 10y ago

I guess that makes AlphaGo an AIdiot savant?

gsam 10y ago

In my view, part of the fundamental problem of current AI approaches for tackling general intelligence is the inability to collate and organize different systems and algorithms together in a coherent manner. To use a flawed but useful mode of thinking: we've succeeded at codifying crystallized intelligent systems (far beyond human means), we've made some progress on fluid intelligent systems (at worst random search), but we have not managed to make any progress on the mediator of the two. We can build a million different single purpose neural networks, but we have so few meta-classifiers for knowing which network to use at which time (and can also change track their own self-modification). Watson is possibly the closest we have at this time, but it seems to work on static information which it cannot update or improve on itself.

chejazi 10y ago

OK, so we have AIs that are capable of solving a very specific problem. My questions is, are AI's capable of being composed? In the sense that if I have 1000 AIs that are each experts at performing their domain specific tasks, can one or more AIs be built on top of them that specialize almost exclusively in delegation? i.e. they delegate intelligently depending on the task at hand. If that's possible, then we could in theory build a generalized AI, right?

gsam 10y ago
A simple decision tree could suffice. Is it a speech problem, is it an image problem? Is it a classification problem? Failing to find an acceptable answer, it does what seems closest or makes a random but plausible decision. This doesn't seem too far from what humans would be doing. Part of the problem is the meta-recognition of the problem and how to organize that within an actual system.
gus_massa 10y ago
It's not good to abuse of the analogies, but the human brain have to spend more time in task with conflicting information, for example to read the word "yellow" when it's written with blue ink, ... More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect

S4M 10y ago

relevant: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160329-why-alphago-is-really-such-a-big-deal/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160329-why-alphago-is-reall...

suprfnk 10y ago

Offtopic, but why do people design websites this [1] way? The content isn't even a fourth of the page width, then the rest of the page is filled with random articles, newsletter signup and follow buttons. The topic sounds interesting, but the presentation is incredibly off-putting. 1: http://i.imgur.com/Obxuj9A.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Obxuj9A.jpg

qeternity 10y ago

I really don't understand why all this pedantic squabbling over terminology. Nobody has suggested that AlphaGo is AGI or human-level intelligence. But it is intelligent. Just like in humans or any other organism, intelligence is a spectrum. Artificial intelligence is no different. I think even the laymen understands that AlphaGo is not a sentient being inside a computer, just like people understood the same about DeepBlue.

flashman 10y ago
> intelligence is a spectrum To me, saying algorithms are on the intelligence spectrum is like saying the weather report is on the humour spectrum. It's true but ultimately meaningless, because neither algorithms nor the weather report exhibit the interesting properties of those spectrums.

parenthephobia 10y ago

One problem with defining what is and isn't AI in the current age is that as something approaching "real" AI - rather than Hollywood AI - enters the public consciousness, it is seized upon by marketers wanting to attach the new buzzword to their products, effectively diluting the term in the process. Things that a decade ago would have been described as performing regression analysis, and just last year doing machine learning, may be described this year as being powered by AI.

ucaetano 10y ago

Title: "Why AlphaGo Is Not AI" Actual argument: "Is [AlphaGo] going to get us to full AI, in the sense of an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, machine? Not quite" Conclusion: "the rapid advances of deep learning and the recent success of this kind of AI at games like Go" So not only the article discusses something different from the headline, it directly contradicts the headline by calling AlphaGo a type of AI. Bad journalism.

itchyjunk 10y ago

If a chimp could play the game of go at the same level as humans, would we say the chimp had intelligence? When you base your definition of intelligence on sample size of 1 (humans), but can't even define within that context, you get these kinds of problems. Is platypus a mammal or not? Does the classification change the function? Are all humans intelligent or posses natural intelligence? Is there a degree of intelligence? i.e. are some humans in possession of more intelligence than others? I look at artificial intelligence as an umbrella term which has varying meaning depending on context. If you classify a task as needing intelligence to solve and someone finds a piece of code to do it, you have an artificial intelligence there. You can keep moving the goal post but it's only nuances and definition.

mannykannot 10y ago
There are problems where humans need to use intelligence, but which are amenable to brute-force computing - chess is an example - and that does not, in my view, make brute-force computing class as intelligence. It does not accord with what the term AI originally meant, and the first moving of the goal post was to apply it to these cases.

adzm 10y ago

Relevant Hofstadter quote: > Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

bsaul 10y ago

I don't understand the critics this article receive here. It makes a very good counterpoint to all the hype the AI field is living at the moment, letting people from the general audience believe that algorithms will replace humans quite soon. You may think it doesn't matter, but we've candidates to the presidential elections here in france building economical programs assuming "robots will do everything soon, so let's provide everybody with a universal revenue" as a likely immediate future. It is extremely healthy to let people understand all we've been able to build so far are number crunching machines, which absolutely don't give any kind of meaning to the numbers they see passing by. Meaning as : i see what this number represents, and the consequences it has in real people's context.

visarga 10y ago
> all we've been able to build so far are number crunching machines, which absolutely don't give any kind of meaning to the numbers they see passing by All humans are just protein factories, which don't have any meaning other than electrical pulses and chemical reactions.
- gattilorenz 10y ago
  Apart from the fact that the OP was talking about giving meaning (Chinese room, anyone?), not having meaning, I think that too is up for debate. For sure there's no clear, agreed, universal meaning, and most likely it does not have a meaning to you. Not everyone thinks like that, though. edit: [OT] "have a meaning to you" or "for you"? I have the impression that there's a slightly different interpretation, and one might be offensive (not intended). Or are they the same?
mannykannot 10y ago
If the mind is that what a physical brain does, then a physical brain can in principle be simulated - by crunching numbers - to produce a mind (some have claimed that there must be more to it than that, but none have come up with a generally-accepted justification for their position.)
- 10y ago

rocqua 10y ago

> Culture is the essential catalyst of intelligence I liked the article on many fronts and thought it tried to justify most of its claims. However, the quoted claim goes unsupported. Does anyone know of justifications for the quoted claim?

empath75 10y ago

In a hundred years, google is going to be arguing with Facebook about whether humans are intelligent.

PunchTornado 10y ago

this is one of those clickbaiting articles: - taylor swift is not really an artist - paulo coehlo is not really a writer - javascript is not really programming - Trump is not really human

m3kw9 10y ago

This is a pointless argument, we all know AI is all about thought. If a person can't move does he still have intelligence?

notahacker 10y ago
Whilst I don't like the author's way of phrasing interaction with real world information as "fundamentally tied to robotics", humans whose range of movement is restricted to scrunching up one cheek have won Nobel prizes because even with their physiological limitations they've still had access to and assimilated information vastly more complex and unstructured than board positions for the game of Go in order to be able to devise their own considerably more complex and varied end goals and means of communication to reach them. Whilst a computer which can choose hundred of legal Go positions at each turn might actually have more output channels than Stephen Hawking, it hasn't had and doesn't have the range of inputs to be in a position to contemplate alternative end goals such as dictating books on theoretical physics or ordering a cheeseburger (let alone the ability to learn how to be understood by sympathetic non-computers enough to overcome its physical limitations) One can turn it around: if an organism has no means of assessing or communicating with the outside world bar the ability to send and receive electrical signals so simple they can be mapped to the game of Go and whose survival to the next generation depends on electrical signals combining in various rare patterns hardcoded into its DNA (which could be mapped to the win conditions for the game of Go), would we even consider the possibility of such an organism being intelligent simply because its route to achieving those patterns was incomprehensible to and could not be deactivated by counter-stimuli from the humans that studied it? Would such a theoretical organism even need to be composed of more than one cell?

vonnik 10y ago

The headline for this piece is clickbait. AlphaGo is AI, it's just not strong AI. No AI is strong AI for the moment, but that doesn't mean that the AI we have is uninteresting or a dead end, as the author seems to think. The author and his editors deliberately conflate the two terms in the headline, and clarify after about a paragraph. Sure, AlphaGo is not strong AI. And Abraham Lincoln is dead. And there are lots of other things everyone knows that don't deserve to be in the news. Jean-Christophe Baillie wrote this piece. He has done some work in AI and computer vision, and he had the opportunity here to write a piece that reflected that expertise. Instead he made a rather facile point that is similar to saying "Graffiti isn't art." That argument won't lead anywhere interesting. He rehashes the Chomsky-ian argument about meaning. That AI's won't understand meaning until they can connect representations to the world. Then he makes the point that this requires embodiment, that they have a physical body in space through which they connect to the world. I don't believe either of these are necessary requirements for AI. An AI that solves a lot of problems better than humans, and transfers that learning across many problems with relative ease, is getting close to strong AI. It doesn't really matter whether the machine constructs meaning to itself or not. It doesn't have to be humanlike to be strong. Secondly, AIs can train perfectly well in virtual environments. They don't have to be embodied as robots to be considered strong. We can model the world with enough complexity to give AIs problems that, if solved, might define them as strong.

halflings 10y ago
RE:the embodiment/robotics argument, notice that he has a vested interest in this field: > Several research labs are now trying to go further into acquiring grammar, gestures, and more complex cultural conventions using this approach, in particular the AI Lab that I founded at Aldebaran, the French robotics company—now part of the SoftBank Group.
partycoder 10y ago
Very disappointing article indeed. Alpha Go is an AI project with historical relevance, that had a well specified and measurable goal, which is beating humans in a game that requires to develop an intuition for moves rather than just reading moves in advance. Having said that I don't understand what's the point of trying to delegitimize the significance of Alpha Go. Implementing what we call "intuition" is not a minor thing. In contrast, I encountered the Pepper robot in a mall in SF. It was almost impossible to interact with it, so if there is going to be a critique, why not starting from one of his own projects.

RandyRanderson 10y ago

IMO there are only 2 problems in machine learning (ML): 1 Regression - Given a set of vector pairs Xi and Yi, find a function that maps each Xi to Yi minimizing some objective function. 2 Path Finding - Given some topology (typically on some regression output) find the "best" path, given some objective function. All other problems (classification, clustering, etc) can be reposed as a combination of these two. Viewed in this way, an "AI" system set on any reasonable test of intelligence would score super-human (defined against the average adult human) with the current set of algos, with one caveat. If we think of operating systems in say the 90s we would mostly agree that few innovations (evolutions as opposed to revolutions) have occurred when compared to the OSs we have today. It's the development, integration, testing, tools, hardware support, etc that have taken all this time. So, to the article's point, the AlphaGo system does these 2 things pretty well just as Windows95 did things pretty well. Yet even today I have to restart my computer every time there is the most trivial of updates. TL;DR Super human Audio/Visual/NLP ML == AI is both here now and a long way off. One could probably cut this to one but stating it would be very convoluted. Also "pathing" problems are typically non-convex and real-time whereas regression problems are typically not.

inventtheday 10y ago

Its more like AlphaGo is a PIECE of strong AI. Deep learning, as its implemented today, is probably not the secret sauce of consciousness, but it is a powerful and useful subsystem. In that sense, it is a tangible step towards the eventual goal of general strong AI.

didibus 10y ago

This is how I see it: If the machine comes up with the decision making logic, it's AI, if it does not, it's not AI. A sorting algorithm, in most cases, is a description of the logic to decide how to proceed at each step to accomplish the task of sorting. The computer merely executes that logic for us very very quickly. On the other hand, self driving machine learning algorithms come up with the logic of how to base the decision of when to steer left/right, to what degree, when to accelerate and decelerate, to what degree, all by themselves. Often time, we can't even formalize the logic they use, we can only test to see how well it performs. This is AI. The computer originated intelligence, it did not simply execute it. Within that, there is a spectrum which even human exhibit. I cannot come up with logic to solve all tasks. For most tasks, I would need a good teacher and a lot of practice before I can find on my own logic that can solve a task, even so slightly, depending on the difficulty of the task at hand. I'd say there's only one exception to this rule. Sometimes it is useful to call something which appears intelligent AI. Like in most video games, the computer is actually simply executing the logic a programmer told it about, but to most players, you will believe as if it is coming up with it on its own. Most often, it does not and did not, a programmer came up with it, but you're fooled into thinking otherwise, and the computer appears sentient. This is not true intelligence, but being able to use logic to make decision, even if that logic did not originate from you, is probably a part of intelligence. In a sense, if I could program a machine to perform all tasks, even though it uses the logic that I came up with, that machine would appear quite useful. It would only fail when encountering a task it has never seen, or a condition in a task that's not accounted for in my logic. Machine learning would not fail at those, in that, it could re-learn from the new condition, and come up with a different way to solve the task.

wglb 10y ago

How old is the debate about what is really AI? A program called _Chess_ written in 1970s by Larry Atkin and David Slate at Northwestern did manage to win one game from David Levy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_(Northwestern_University) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_(Northwestern_University... Atkin often complained about the characterization of their program being AI, saying (paraphrasing here) "It isn't AI. It is just good software engineering."

sgt101 10y ago

Margaret Boden made these points previously. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/276 http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/276 A fun alternative strand in AI research driven by these thoughts (I think) is typified by Rosie. Rosie is the proper job. http://soar.eecs.umich.edu/articles/articles/videos-rosie http://soar.eecs.umich.edu/articles/articles/videos-rosie There is an unseemly comment in this thread that alludes to a genuine issue with the embodied AI arguement. People with other bodies are not lesser intelligences than those who have a socially cast "typical" body or sensors. And given that one has to question this line of reasoning. The answer is that intelligence is embodied outside and beyond your physical being - it's your body, your family, your tribe and so on. I find the philosophy difficult, but to prove that there is something in this view you need to hike out to a wood somewhere and spend a couple of weeks by yourself. Things happen and who you are changes (did for me) cut yourself off or be cut off and you are as less human (autonomous cognitive agent) as one can become.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

While I acccept Alpha Go as 'real AI' (I watched the match with Lee in realtime, and years ago I wrote and marketed my Go playing program 'Honninbo Warrior') I agree that Alpha Go is not a general purpose AI. Deep learning has been personally career/interests changing, but I still think that we should be building hybrid neural network / symbolic AI systems.

ganfortran 10y ago

BS. It is AI that this AI can only play Go.

intrasight 10y ago

Defining AI is hard - we can agree on that. I think the best definitions are in the form of tests that match the performance against organisms that have developed intelligence through millions of years of evolution. The Turning Test is a good example of this. I think that we can all agree that an AI that passes the Turing Test is intelligent. But that is the final goal post. What about intermediate milestones? My opinion is that games just don't count. I think that creating similar test as milestones would do more to progress the AI field. Like the Turning Test, it must test that parity with another intelligent being is achieved. Intelligence is a spectrum from "not very" to "omniscient". What are some organisms that are closer to the "not very" end of this spectrum that would be good candidates for parity tests? How would a parity test be performed? It is in answering that question that one arrives at “There is no AI without robotics”. If you want to demonstrate that your artificial cockroach is as intelligent as the real thing, then you have to build a robot. It doesn't have to be a physical robot as long as you have a simulator that can do a very accurate simulations of the physics of the environment, the AI candidate, and their interactions. That's not so easy, which is why many if not most researchers build physical robots. Would a cockroach be a good first milestone? Too complex? How about a worm? Achieved parity with cockroach? Then move on to Jumping Spiders. When your great-grandchildren achieve that parity, my great-grandchildren will certainly celebrate with them.

happycube 10y ago

There's an old AI Winter saying: "If it works, it's not AI" ;)

dbcurtis 10y ago

AlphaGo is not AI in exactly the same way that Aldebaran robots are not robots. Seriously, what do those robots do? They are just one step above Disneyland's pre-programmed animatronics. If this dude wants me to take him seriously, he needs to show me a robot that solves a problem for somebody. Nao is just a waste of perfectly good servos. Or, alternatively, if he insists that Nao is a robot, then I think AlphaGo can be considered AI. People have been saying "___ is not AI" since Claude Shannon built a robot mouse to solve a maze. Then Shannon's chess playing program was "not AI". Humbug.

unityByFreedom 10y ago
> People have been saying "___ is not AI" since Claude Shannon built a robot mouse to solve a maze. Then Shannon's chess playing program was "not AI". Humbug. AI researchers say this because they don't want the hype to lead investors putting money in the wrong places, which could cause another AI winter. OpenAI is one example. Fortunately, that's a non-profit. If it were profit seeking and they had a large investment that went belly up, it might cause the industry to tank. That bust will probably happen again in the future. The "scrooges" are just trying to forestall it.

quantum_state 10y ago

It wud be beneficial to take a pramagtic approach ... AI or not ... as long as the end product helps human conditions ... we just use ... similar debates happened so many times in the past ... there is really no point to divert the attention ... for the people who know, it is clear the title is a click bait ... for the people who don't know .. they find out this anyway after they click ..

dllthomas 10y ago

Of course it's not really AI; it works.

visarga 10y ago

> AlphaGo Is Not AI And the questioning article is not real writing. It fails to the standards of "real writing" that I uphold. A real article doesn't come with a clickbait title, and is better documented. I don't think the author knows what he's talking about - instead, just expressing incredulity based off his gut feelings.

powerapple 10y ago

are "we" the result of hardcoded DNA or the result of learning? Our objective of survival is kind of hardcoded objective we optimize our life on. Why do we care about if we can build another "intelligence" similar to ours? Why not just build something good at jobs we don't want to do, and leave "culture" to us. I strongly believe a higher being will laugh to see we call ourself intelligent the same way we see artificial intelligence.

digitalshankar 10y ago

AlphaGo is an AI, author of this article thinks AI to understand itself and code itself and have sex then reproduce, WTF? AI is Technology and not Biology. AI and Human Brain are not the same. This is like saying AI to take birth by itself without human programming it.

deleted 10y ago

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paradite 10y ago

Regarding the definition of AI, I find lecture notes for intro to AI courses in various university [1] very useful: > Views of AI fall into four categories: > Thinking humanly - Cognitive Modeling > Thinking rationally - “Laws of Thought” > Acting humanly - Turing Test > Acting rationally - Rational Agent > The textbook advocates "acting rationally" Indeed most of the things we see today in AI community is solving the problem of "acting rationally" whereas the other categories have their respective fields (Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Philosophy) that are no longer closely related to computer science. [1] http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~hzhang/c145/notes/m1-intro-6p.pdf http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~hzhang/c145/notes/m1-intro-6p....

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
I would say that if your paradigm for studying thought cannot explain away at least two of the other three, you've got it wrong. A good theory in cognitive modeling ought to have applications to all the rest. A good theory of acting rationally ought to have applications to acting humanly or thinking rationally, and ideally to thinking humanly as well.