3 ms·

You are apparently talking about "Turing machines" by which you mean finite automata connected to a 2-d tape or things very close to that. That class of machin

by dasht 16y ago

You are apparently talking about "Turing machines" by which you mean finite automata connected to a 2-d tape or things very close to that. That class of machines is a tiny subset of turing complete machines and that class of machines you refer to is irrelevant to the arguments to which you are responding. When you argue that a simple (just a few rules of physics) emulator could, in principle, do the job -- quite right. Unfortunately for your point, Kurzweil is making a much, much stronger claim. For, surely, you agree that that physics emulation isn't going to result in a practical program in 20 years, yes? The way you are using "upper bound of the problem in terms of complexity" there... I could use your same logic to argue that the design of a brain can be encoded in exactly 1 bit. The design of a brain, by your logic, contains 1 bit of information. (In particular, that 50 MB of compressed genome data? I'll give you a better compression algorithm for this purpose and it will, indeed, compress a particular human genome down to 1 bit.)

jacquesm 16y ago
> You are apparently talking about "Turing machines" by which you mean finite automata connected to a 2-d tape or things very close to that. That class of machines is a tiny subset of turing complete machines and that class of machines you refer to is irrelevant to the arguments to which you are responding. Since all Turing complete machines are functionally equivalent I don't think it is quite that irrelevant. if the brain can be simulated by any Turing machine at all it figures that a 2-d tape Turing machine can do the same thing. The question then becomes how big is the total information content of both Turing machine + tape. The rules of physics are Turing complete, we use them to build computers with and nature uses them to build the physical universe, including computers and brains. Kurzweil is not making such a strong claim at all I think, he merely argues that there must be some upper boundary to the starting configuration from which you should be able to arrive at a working brain. And much as I would like to I can't find fault with that other than that the embryotic development is chaotic in nature and that a very small change in input conditions can easily produce nothing of interest on the output side. The conclusion that we can draw from that is that the brain (and in fact probably every cell in our bodies) must contain a great deal of machinery to make sure that the process stays on track and does not veer off in to chaos and unpredictable outcomes. For the most part, it works, most of the fetuses carried to term are able to think. > For, surely, you agree that that physics emulation isn't going to result in a practical program in 20 years, yes? Some people claim even shorter times than that (which I think is highly irresponsible): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1201724/Artificial-brain-reality-just-10-years-scientists-claim.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1201724/Artificial... Personally I would put the time required for such a project in the multiple decades, probably 50 years at a minimum, maybe much more assuming that it can be done and that there is no quantum component (as proposed by Penrose, rather weakly) to intelligence. As for your 1 bit description, you are not taking in to account the information content of the guts of the compression algorithm, and you'd find that algo+compressed data would work out to a nearly constant amount of information. That 50MB has been created in a way that the size of the algorithm required to compress it and decompress it is relatively small compared to the size of the data. As soon as you start embedding codebooks inside your algorithm the size of the data will go down but the size of the algorithm goes up correspondingly. Also the algorithm loses its universal character, it's ability to encode multiple data sets with roughly equal characteristics in terms of information content in to roughly equally sized output.

by dasht 16y ago

jacquesm 16y ago

> You are apparently talking about "Turing machines" by which you mean finite automata connected to a 2-d tape or things very close to that. That class of machines is a tiny subset of turing complete machines and that class of machines you refer to is irrelevant to the arguments to which you are responding. Since all Turing complete machines are functionally equivalent I don't think it is quite that irrelevant. if the brain can be simulated by any Turing machine at all it figures that a 2-d tape Turing machine can do the same thing. The question then becomes how big is the total information content of both Turing machine + tape. The rules of physics are Turing complete, we use them to build computers with and nature uses them to build the physical universe, including computers and brains. Kurzweil is not making such a strong claim at all I think, he merely argues that there must be some upper boundary to the starting configuration from which you should be able to arrive at a working brain. And much as I would like to I can't find fault with that other than that the embryotic development is chaotic in nature and that a very small change in input conditions can easily produce nothing of interest on the output side. The conclusion that we can draw from that is that the brain (and in fact probably every cell in our bodies) must contain a great deal of machinery to make sure that the process stays on track and does not veer off in to chaos and unpredictable outcomes. For the most part, it works, most of the fetuses carried to term are able to think. > For, surely, you agree that that physics emulation isn't going to result in a practical program in 20 years, yes? Some people claim even shorter times than that (which I think is highly irresponsible): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1201724/Artificial-brain-reality-just-10-years-scientists-claim.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1201724/Artificial... Personally I would put the time required for such a project in the multiple decades, probably 50 years at a minimum, maybe much more assuming that it can be done and that there is no quantum component (as proposed by Penrose, rather weakly) to intelligence. As for your 1 bit description, you are not taking in to account the information content of the guts of the compression algorithm, and you'd find that algo+compressed data would work out to a nearly constant amount of information. That 50MB has been created in a way that the size of the algorithm required to compress it and decompress it is relatively small compared to the size of the data. As soon as you start embedding codebooks inside your algorithm the size of the data will go down but the size of the algorithm goes up correspondingly. Also the algorithm loses its universal character, it's ability to encode multiple data sets with roughly equal characteristics in terms of information content in to roughly equally sized output.