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> My counter-hypothesis is this: Computers, compared to humans, will always be more data-hungry (i.e. worse at making general decisions without huge amounts of
by justinpombrio 9y ago
> My counter-hypothesis is this: Computers, compared to humans, will always be more data-hungry (i.e. worse at making general decisions without huge amounts of data) and more data-capable (i.e. better at making decisions with it).
Counterexample:
AlphaGo Zero is currently the best Go player in the world. (It beat AlphaGo, and AlphaGo beat humans.) AlphaGo Zero learned to play Go entirely by playing itself; it was given no training set at all.
- k_sh 9y agoIt's still more data-hungry, though. AlphaGo can play many millions of rounds against itself in the time it takes a human to play one round. Humans are many magnitudes more efficient at improving a skill, computers just appear to do it better sometimes because they can move faster.
- jdietrich 9y ago>Humans are many magnitudes more efficient at improving a skill In the case of go, most definitely not. AlphaGo Zero achieved world-beating performance in just three days, running on four TPUs. Becoming a world class player cost somewhere in the region of 150kWh. A fairly sedentary human requires about 2.5kWh of food per day. Achieving mastery of go takes at least 10 years of full-time study, so we're looking at a bare minimum of ~9000kWh. That excludes the energy inputs to make that food (often orders of magnitude higher) and the multitude of other energy inputs required to keep a human being healthy and sane.