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It's good, really, that this article focussed on Tinsley. I saw a talk by Schaeffer about ten years ago, just as he was finishing up solving checkers, and it w
by blahedo 9y ago
It's good, really, that this article focussed on Tinsley. I saw a talk by Schaeffer about ten years ago, just as he was finishing up solving checkers, and it was an astonishingly depressing talk. He invested his whole life—decades—as I recall his marriage failed partially as a result of his obsession with this—on what, in the end, was a lookup table. There was a lot of neat engineering he had to do along the way (storage, parallel work) but that's not what he cared about: he cared that he had solved checkers. Were there any insights about patterns that could be induced, maybe to teach humans how to do analysis or to learn some interesting mathematical fact about the graph structure of the board? No—you just see what the board state is, and look it up in the database to tell you the next move. I can't even tell you how demotivational this speech was.
- Pulcinella 9y agoSometimes I fear that this will be the end result of brain research. A vast table that says: when these neurons are activated in this pattern, it means happiness. When these neurons are activated in this pattern, it means the brain is perceiving a tree. We will understand the brain and consciousness and it will be completely unenlightening... :(
- degenerate 9y agoThere's no way to map "what is the meaning of life?" to a table, so you'll never have that problem. As long as our universe and existence isn't 100% solved, the human brain will never be solved!
- fiblye 9y agoIt's been a few years, but I recall there being research into 100% mapping out crab or ant behavior and it was getting to a point of being quite accurate. Mammal brains have a few extra layers of complexity, but none of those layers involve magic. If ever we get around to "solving" one animal's brain, it shows that others can be as well.
- plopz 9y agoMaybe we'll be able to finally prove that free will doesn't exist.
- Afton 9y agoIt's not that it does, or doesn't exist. It's that the whole common sense notion is literally incoherent.
- QuantumGravy 9y agoReligions and denominations of the same religion won't even agree on the nature or existence of free will. Why everyone else is so concerned about the same, I don't understand. It's more philosophy than science in most discussions. If acting as if your actions had internal agency offers better chances of survival, that's a good enough fudge for nature.
- chongli 9y agoThere's no way we'll be able to do that until we have an agreed-upon definition of free will. Good luck with that. We can't even come up with rigorous definitions of many common, related words: intelligence, thinking/thought, life. Heck, we can't even define pornography! All of these ultimately boil down to "I know it when I see it". This sort of definition is not good enough for scientific inquiry. For that reason, scientists tend to avoid such questions.
- logicallee 9y ago
- soVeryTired 9y agoIgnoramus et ignorabimus?
- kingraoul3 9y agoThat kind of understanding has a philosophical limit to what it can describe though - consider that an alien being, with an alien physiology would still experience what we would call pain, without the c-fibers firing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
- msla 9y agoWhat a coincidence: I'm a philosophical zombie. (Well... prove I'm not!)
- jpeanuts 9y agoYour story suggests value in another article focussing on the personalities of Tinsley and Schaeffer. Both obsessives, both pre-eminent in their domain, but in quite different ways - and with different consequences on the rest of their lives. Tinsley's variety of obsession seems much healthier than Schaeffer's.
- bwanab 9y agoBack in my college days I had a summer job as an intern at a maximum security psychiatric hospital. My main ward was the admittance ward which was essentially where men accused of a crime were evaluated if their fitness to stand trial was in question. However, there was this one 20 something who had been there for years. He was accused of a horrific crime and had been diagnosed with an IQ of 65. This kid loved to play checkers. I started playing with him and over the course of the summer probably played 100 or so games with him. He beat me the first 50 or so times I played him and my assessment was that he had every possible board setup memorized and knew the right move for each of them. Whenever I made a mistake, he capitalized instantaneously. After the 50th or so game, I had memorized enough setups that I could split games with him.