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The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)

57 points by cjauvin 8y ago

seiferteric 8y ago
The author seems to have far to narrow an idea of what a computer is.
- nmstoker 8y ago
  Yes, this is precisely what I thought as I read it. I don't doubt his expertise on the brain side, but he characterises the computer in a very limited way, almost perfectly suited to make his argument. With the reconstruction of the dollar there are plenty of examples how computers need not store entire instances of a thing to be able to recognise it later, such as applications of hash functions or doing spam filtering.
- naasking 8y ago
  This seems like the appropriate response to the article. In fact, the article is even factually wrong on the matter of what we're born with, and it's even wrong on what it considers "information". I suspect this misunderstanding of "information" is the core of the confusion. He needs to revisit physics and learn some computer science, because information and physics are inextricably intertwined, so the brain very much operates on information using rules. Edit: and further, the brain is a finite state automaton due to the Bekenstein Bound, a physics theorem.
baddox 8y ago
Oh dear. This isn’t my field at all, and maybe I’m just doing a bad job of understanding their point, but this sounds completely bogus. Really...the brain doesn’t create representations of visual stimuli or store memories? Under what possible definitions of those words can this statement be sensical? Surely the author believes that visual stimuli cause measurable changes in brain state, and that people can indeed remember past visual stimuli. Then how is it true that brains don’t create representations of visual stimuli and store and retrieve them? I’m at a loss here. Perhaps the author means that the brain doesn’t do these things in the same way as digital electronic computers we’re familiar with. That’s certainly the case at the most basic level.
- lisper 8y ago
  > this sounds completely bogus It is. http://blog.rongarret.info/2019/01/are-you-turing-machine.html http://blog.rongarret.info/2019/01/are-you-turing-machine.ht...
- skywhopper 8y ago
  Yes “computer” here means “digital electronic computer” and yes the storage, retrieval, and processing all happens very differently in the brain than digital computers are capable of. You may think these are dumb points for the author to make, but it’s not clear to me at all that the media or the VCs who buy the hype about machine learning, AI, and self-driving cars realize just how different they are.
  - naasking 8y ago
    > Yes “computer” here means “digital electronic computer” and yes the storage, retrieval, and processing all happens very differently in the brain than digital computers are capable of. No, it's incorrect to use "digital computer" here. More correct might be a von Neumann architecture computer. But then that shows that the author is attacking a strawman: people comparing brains to computers aren't limiting themselves to such an architecture.
    - ChrisSD 8y ago
      Are you sure? This mostly comes up in pop sci explanations where von Neumann architecture may as well be synonymous with "digital computer" because it's all the vast majority of readers are familiar with.
      - naasking 8y ago
        A "digital computer" is simply one in which information is represented in binary. The encoding of information does not alter the process of computation, so that's an irrelevant detail to compare to. We have plenty of Harvard architecture computers (eg. DSPs), and there are plenty of other computational architectures (DNA computing, optical computing, quantum computing).
aresant 8y ago
“The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.” I actually like this as an idea that our tools for understanding brain functions are still too primitive and the traditional comment base compute models are lacking.
- baddox 8y ago
  I’m struggling with the definition of “retrieve” used here. According to the meanings of “retrieve” that I’m familiar with, I can’t conceive of any sense in which songs or finger movements aren’t retrieved by the brain.
  - through_17 8y ago
    "I can’t conceive of any sense in which songs or finger movements aren’t retrieved by the brain." And that's the issue, isn't it? I think he's using "retrieve" to mean something much closer to what a digital computer does. Ie, there's a single "place" in the brain where the song is compressed and stored. My definition of "retrieve" (and yours, I think) is implicitly more relaxed; I say that a rough distributed system that reacts to stimuli like songs by being able to approximately reproduce them later counts as "retrieval." As other commenters have noted, the article uses a very restrictive definition of computation/retrieval. I mean, earlier in the article, he gives a definition of the same game that the "Lifelong Learning" and "Reinforcement Learning" people use. I think he's actually on the same page as many learning theorists, and is just trying to make it clear to a general audience that a very "tight" match between the brain and Von Neumann machines isn't reasonable.
    - baddox 8y ago
      Perhaps that’s what he meant, but does anyone even claim that that is the case?
xparco 8y ago
Then wtf is it?
0_gravitas 8y ago
I've been meaning to write an essay for a long time now about how our personal abstractions of things and how they are defined/work can make nuanced discussions about certain ideas difficult; I believe this post is a victim of that.
radarsat1 8y ago
> Those changes, whatever they are, are built on the unique neural structure that already exists, each structure having developed over a lifetime of unique experiences. What does he mean by "neural structure" here and how is it different from "memory" and "representations" which supposedly we don't have?
warent 8y ago
Isn't this directly contradicted by the grid cells? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell It sounds like because the author doesn't understand how neurons create a representation of reality, they're splitting hairs and saying it doesn't.
leftyted 8y ago
The dollar bill thing seems silly. The fact you can draw anything without looking at a dollar bill means something is being stored, right? That means the brain stores information. There's no way out of that. And that fact that you can draw the dollar bill on cue means something is being retrieved. No way around that either. It doesn't matter how the information is represented. The brain as a computer analogy doesn't specify that "neurons are bits" or whatever. I don't expect the brain to work like any computer we've ever built (which seems to be the point of view this writer is attacking), but I do expect that it has the capacity to store, retrieve, and process information and so the computer analogy seems useful.
- imh 8y ago
  Yeah, you could make the same complaints about jpeg compression.
  - zzzeek 8y ago
    Jpeg compression was my thought exactly. This author knows extremely little about computers.
your-nanny 8y ago
The author's notion of computer does not serve him well. It is too grounded in his experience of digital computing devices rather than an understanding of computing as a kind of process. Furthermore, the field of computational neuroscience is doing quite well, thank you. Tempral difference learning is both an algorithm and instantiated in brains in some form.
ozy 8y ago
Imagine a database that stores strings using a common prefix method, one could make the same claim: this database does not store or retrieve strings. And yet it does. The model of what something does is implemented by an underlying mechanism. But for many reasons the mechanism doesn't have to be, and often isn't, a naive translation of the model.
ThomPete 8y ago
Neither is a computer a brain. But the brain and the computer are both pattern recognizing feedback loop one just isn't as developed yet. The computer doesn't see the image but neither do I. We simulate it.
mannykannot 8y ago
It is trivially true that the brain is not a digital electronic computer. You cannot, however, use that simple fact to show that the brain is not some sort of information-processing device, and as for the notion that brains do not store information, I wonder what he thinks memories are. The author concludes by asking "Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?" He offers no support for the proposition that this view is common, and I suspect he is often taking, as literal, speech that was intended to be metaphorical.
zzzeek 8y ago
The author smugly assumes we all lack imagination in how the human mind might work, when in reality, it is he who lacks imagination in how computers or algorithms might someday work.
gus_massa 8y ago
The article has so many errors that it is hard to write a reply. Let's pick one: > The information first has to be encoded into a format computers can use, which means patterns of ones and zeroes (‘bits’) organised into small chunks (‘bytes’) The author should have read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer
hyperion2010 8y ago
The author seems to be hung up on a distinction between two representations and trying to argue that they cannot be the same thing, despite the fact that we have abundant evidence that both are readily interconvertible. Now, I would agree that a neural net that converges to a grammar might not be a grammar, but at that point we would seem to be missing the forest for the trees.
presscast 8y ago
In a former life I was a cognitive neuroscience researcher. This reads like a piece written by someone who heard a neuroscientist take issue with the "brain as computer" metaphor, but didn't quite grasp what it was all about. The "brain is not a computer" meme has to do with the fact that the brain does not process information in the same way as a digital computer. It is not saying that the brain is not a symbol-processing/computational system.
charleshmorse 8y ago
I think us commenters are all on the same page here :) The author is almost making it seem like models are reality and that people think that. They're not and I don't think anyone has ever thought they were... Further and like other comments already mentioned, the brain is thought of and treated as a turing machine, not a digital computer. It's done this way, because the brain can be mapped to the definition of a turing machine. And I have to defend Von Neumann. In his book, he explored turing equivalencies between the brain and computer concepts at the time used to implement the digital turing machine, he didn't actually think that the brain was a one-to-one mapping to a digital computer... He knew the difference between models and reality. Even for the history of models the author mentions (hydraulics, automata, etc.), these all contain some turing equivalencies if implemented correctly and they were simply using the language and examples at the time to express this. The author also continues to mangle any and all ideas of modeling, abstraction, and equivalence throughout the whole article. With regard to his 'uniqueness problem', I mean 'information loss' is modeled digitally for a reason.. just because humans are lossy, doesn't mean we can't model them that way. Think of a compressed image file. I don't think there's a single researcher worth their salt that thinks the 'IP Metaphor' is gospel. That is just a grossly unscientific idea to assume. We're all free to choose any model or collection of models we wish to approximate reality, but some of them work better than others and the brain is a complicated thing to model. The author is trying to dramatize a triviality.
- sykic 8y ago
  How can the brain be mapped to the definition of a Turning machine? It doesn’t have an equivalent to an infinite tape and it doens’t work accoriding to anything like the table of rules for a Turning machine. Can you point me to a reference for this claim? Most of the comments I’ve read don’t like the article but almost all of the commenters I’ve read don’t seem to have studied this issue. It gives me the impression that these are visceral reactions. The article is not an article for experts. It’s expository in nature. One thing that stood out for me was this quote: The Future of the Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s current state might also be meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised. If true this seems to me (very much a non-expert) to give serious doubt to the notion that the brain is a computer.
age_bronze 8y ago
Dunning Kruger effect going on with the author of the article. He's too ignorant of the subject he's writing about, to understand the difference between the low-level way computers works and the high level sophistication algorithms can exhibit. Quite ironically, I think his line of thought shows precisely why the brain is probably quit like a computer. The algorithm going on in his brain was probably like this: 1. Assuming I'm like a computer leads to negative emotions (because lack of free will and reduction in self-esteem it implies). 2. Therefore give high weights to facts contradicting this, and low weights to facts supporting this. 3. For a range of subjects regarding the behavior of the brain, do: 3.1. If the subject feels like it's logically supporting my view on the subject, add it to the article. 3.1.1. Anything I know the brain does and I have no clue on how can a computer do, will automatically feel like it supports my conclusion. Since I'm pretty clueless as to how computers work in general, most things are actually going to seem like something a computer can't do. 3.2. Otherwise, ignore this and keep going on to the next example.
jacobmoe 8y ago
Funny that "computer" was originally a metaphor applied to the machine from the human occupation.
cuspy 8y ago
Models are not equivalent to the phenomena they describe. Computational models are not an exception to this. There is not even a single "part" or "function" of the brain that we fully, exhaustively understand through a computational explanation. All claims of certainty are premature. What's really fascinating and really needs the attention of historians and anthropologists is why in this current historical moment so many STEM educated people who are otherwise very bright end up confused about this. Maybe the answer is obvious though.
dang 8y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729499
8bitsrule 8y ago
The author mentions Beethoven. Consider what a virtuoso pianist must go through to create a performance of a 40-minute-long sonata. Yes, the performance includes her personal interpretation of what's written on a piece of paper. It is almost certainly influenced by performances others have created. But when it comes to the individual notes, their sequence had damn well better be literally correct for the entire performance. If not, someone in the audience will certainly notice that one flubbed note. So in learning the work, "she was changed in some way" all right. As some members of the audience had been ... identically. And that 'some way' certainly resembles pulling bytes out of 'storage'.
boazbarak 8y ago
Might be an interesting experiment to train a neural network to distinguish between different currencies, and then visualize the features that correspond to the “one dollar neuron”. It might turn out not that far from the drawings of the author’s students.
ilaksh 8y ago
This article would have been more relevant several decades ago when AI research started. But now I think it's mainly a strawman argument because the models are more realistic and different from what he is talking about.
anticycle 8y ago
Worst article I have ever seen on Hacker News.
bkdbkd 8y ago
Meta question: Since this article is a repost and the comments from 2016 and 2019 say the article is largely incorrect, by what process did it make it to the front page. - tl;dr: this is a repost, and panned article, how's it here?

57 points by cjauvin 8y ago

seiferteric 8y ago

The author seems to have far to narrow an idea of what a computer is.

nmstoker 8y ago
Yes, this is precisely what I thought as I read it. I don't doubt his expertise on the brain side, but he characterises the computer in a very limited way, almost perfectly suited to make his argument. With the reconstruction of the dollar there are plenty of examples how computers need not store entire instances of a thing to be able to recognise it later, such as applications of hash functions or doing spam filtering.
naasking 8y ago
This seems like the appropriate response to the article. In fact, the article is even factually wrong on the matter of what we're born with, and it's even wrong on what it considers "information". I suspect this misunderstanding of "information" is the core of the confusion. He needs to revisit physics and learn some computer science, because information and physics are inextricably intertwined, so the brain very much operates on information using rules. Edit: and further, the brain is a finite state automaton due to the Bekenstein Bound, a physics theorem.

baddox 8y ago

Oh dear. This isn’t my field at all, and maybe I’m just doing a bad job of understanding their point, but this sounds completely bogus. Really...the brain doesn’t create representations of visual stimuli or store memories? Under what possible definitions of those words can this statement be sensical? Surely the author believes that visual stimuli cause measurable changes in brain state, and that people can indeed remember past visual stimuli. Then how is it true that brains don’t create representations of visual stimuli and store and retrieve them? I’m at a loss here. Perhaps the author means that the brain doesn’t do these things in the same way as digital electronic computers we’re familiar with. That’s certainly the case at the most basic level.

lisper 8y ago
> this sounds completely bogus It is. http://blog.rongarret.info/2019/01/are-you-turing-machine.html http://blog.rongarret.info/2019/01/are-you-turing-machine.ht...
skywhopper 8y ago
Yes “computer” here means “digital electronic computer” and yes the storage, retrieval, and processing all happens very differently in the brain than digital computers are capable of. You may think these are dumb points for the author to make, but it’s not clear to me at all that the media or the VCs who buy the hype about machine learning, AI, and self-driving cars realize just how different they are.
- naasking 8y ago
  > Yes “computer” here means “digital electronic computer” and yes the storage, retrieval, and processing all happens very differently in the brain than digital computers are capable of. No, it's incorrect to use "digital computer" here. More correct might be a von Neumann architecture computer. But then that shows that the author is attacking a strawman: people comparing brains to computers aren't limiting themselves to such an architecture.
  - ChrisSD 8y ago
    Are you sure? This mostly comes up in pop sci explanations where von Neumann architecture may as well be synonymous with "digital computer" because it's all the vast majority of readers are familiar with.
    - naasking 8y ago
      A "digital computer" is simply one in which information is represented in binary. The encoding of information does not alter the process of computation, so that's an irrelevant detail to compare to. We have plenty of Harvard architecture computers (eg. DSPs), and there are plenty of other computational architectures (DNA computing, optical computing, quantum computing).

aresant 8y ago

“The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.” I actually like this as an idea that our tools for understanding brain functions are still too primitive and the traditional comment base compute models are lacking.

baddox 8y ago
I’m struggling with the definition of “retrieve” used here. According to the meanings of “retrieve” that I’m familiar with, I can’t conceive of any sense in which songs or finger movements aren’t retrieved by the brain.
- through_17 8y ago
  "I can’t conceive of any sense in which songs or finger movements aren’t retrieved by the brain." And that's the issue, isn't it? I think he's using "retrieve" to mean something much closer to what a digital computer does. Ie, there's a single "place" in the brain where the song is compressed and stored. My definition of "retrieve" (and yours, I think) is implicitly more relaxed; I say that a rough distributed system that reacts to stimuli like songs by being able to approximately reproduce them later counts as "retrieval." As other commenters have noted, the article uses a very restrictive definition of computation/retrieval. I mean, earlier in the article, he gives a definition of the same game that the "Lifelong Learning" and "Reinforcement Learning" people use. I think he's actually on the same page as many learning theorists, and is just trying to make it clear to a general audience that a very "tight" match between the brain and Von Neumann machines isn't reasonable.
  - baddox 8y ago
    Perhaps that’s what he meant, but does anyone even claim that that is the case?

xparco 8y ago

Then wtf is it?

0_gravitas 8y ago

I've been meaning to write an essay for a long time now about how our personal abstractions of things and how they are defined/work can make nuanced discussions about certain ideas difficult; I believe this post is a victim of that.

radarsat1 8y ago

> Those changes, whatever they are, are built on the unique neural structure that already exists, each structure having developed over a lifetime of unique experiences. What does he mean by "neural structure" here and how is it different from "memory" and "representations" which supposedly we don't have?

warent 8y ago

Isn't this directly contradicted by the grid cells? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell It sounds like because the author doesn't understand how neurons create a representation of reality, they're splitting hairs and saying it doesn't.

leftyted 8y ago

The dollar bill thing seems silly. The fact you can draw anything without looking at a dollar bill means something is being stored, right? That means the brain stores information. There's no way out of that. And that fact that you can draw the dollar bill on cue means something is being retrieved. No way around that either. It doesn't matter how the information is represented. The brain as a computer analogy doesn't specify that "neurons are bits" or whatever. I don't expect the brain to work like any computer we've ever built (which seems to be the point of view this writer is attacking), but I do expect that it has the capacity to store, retrieve, and process information and so the computer analogy seems useful.

imh 8y ago
Yeah, you could make the same complaints about jpeg compression.
- zzzeek 8y ago
  Jpeg compression was my thought exactly. This author knows extremely little about computers.

your-nanny 8y ago

The author's notion of computer does not serve him well. It is too grounded in his experience of digital computing devices rather than an understanding of computing as a kind of process. Furthermore, the field of computational neuroscience is doing quite well, thank you. Tempral difference learning is both an algorithm and instantiated in brains in some form.

ozy 8y ago

Imagine a database that stores strings using a common prefix method, one could make the same claim: this database does not store or retrieve strings. And yet it does. The model of what something does is implemented by an underlying mechanism. But for many reasons the mechanism doesn't have to be, and often isn't, a naive translation of the model.

ThomPete 8y ago

Neither is a computer a brain. But the brain and the computer are both pattern recognizing feedback loop one just isn't as developed yet. The computer doesn't see the image but neither do I. We simulate it.

mannykannot 8y ago

It is trivially true that the brain is not a digital electronic computer. You cannot, however, use that simple fact to show that the brain is not some sort of information-processing device, and as for the notion that brains do not store information, I wonder what he thinks memories are. The author concludes by asking "Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?" He offers no support for the proposition that this view is common, and I suspect he is often taking, as literal, speech that was intended to be metaphorical.

zzzeek 8y ago

The author smugly assumes we all lack imagination in how the human mind might work, when in reality, it is he who lacks imagination in how computers or algorithms might someday work.

gus_massa 8y ago

The article has so many errors that it is hard to write a reply. Let's pick one: > The information first has to be encoded into a format computers can use, which means patterns of ones and zeroes (‘bits’) organised into small chunks (‘bytes’) The author should have read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer

hyperion2010 8y ago

The author seems to be hung up on a distinction between two representations and trying to argue that they cannot be the same thing, despite the fact that we have abundant evidence that both are readily interconvertible. Now, I would agree that a neural net that converges to a grammar might not be a grammar, but at that point we would seem to be missing the forest for the trees.

presscast 8y ago

In a former life I was a cognitive neuroscience researcher. This reads like a piece written by someone who heard a neuroscientist take issue with the "brain as computer" metaphor, but didn't quite grasp what it was all about. The "brain is not a computer" meme has to do with the fact that the brain does not process information in the same way as a digital computer. It is not saying that the brain is not a symbol-processing/computational system.

charleshmorse 8y ago

I think us commenters are all on the same page here :) The author is almost making it seem like models are reality and that people think that. They're not and I don't think anyone has ever thought they were... Further and like other comments already mentioned, the brain is thought of and treated as a turing machine, not a digital computer. It's done this way, because the brain can be mapped to the definition of a turing machine. And I have to defend Von Neumann. In his book, he explored turing equivalencies between the brain and computer concepts at the time used to implement the digital turing machine, he didn't actually think that the brain was a one-to-one mapping to a digital computer... He knew the difference between models and reality. Even for the history of models the author mentions (hydraulics, automata, etc.), these all contain some turing equivalencies if implemented correctly and they were simply using the language and examples at the time to express this. The author also continues to mangle any and all ideas of modeling, abstraction, and equivalence throughout the whole article. With regard to his 'uniqueness problem', I mean 'information loss' is modeled digitally for a reason.. just because humans are lossy, doesn't mean we can't model them that way. Think of a compressed image file. I don't think there's a single researcher worth their salt that thinks the 'IP Metaphor' is gospel. That is just a grossly unscientific idea to assume. We're all free to choose any model or collection of models we wish to approximate reality, but some of them work better than others and the brain is a complicated thing to model. The author is trying to dramatize a triviality.

sykic 8y ago
How can the brain be mapped to the definition of a Turning machine? It doesn’t have an equivalent to an infinite tape and it doens’t work accoriding to anything like the table of rules for a Turning machine. Can you point me to a reference for this claim? Most of the comments I’ve read don’t like the article but almost all of the commenters I’ve read don’t seem to have studied this issue. It gives me the impression that these are visceral reactions. The article is not an article for experts. It’s expository in nature. One thing that stood out for me was this quote: The Future of the Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s current state might also be meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised. If true this seems to me (very much a non-expert) to give serious doubt to the notion that the brain is a computer.

age_bronze 8y ago

Dunning Kruger effect going on with the author of the article. He's too ignorant of the subject he's writing about, to understand the difference between the low-level way computers works and the high level sophistication algorithms can exhibit. Quite ironically, I think his line of thought shows precisely why the brain is probably quit like a computer. The algorithm going on in his brain was probably like this: 1. Assuming I'm like a computer leads to negative emotions (because lack of free will and reduction in self-esteem it implies). 2. Therefore give high weights to facts contradicting this, and low weights to facts supporting this. 3. For a range of subjects regarding the behavior of the brain, do: 3.1. If the subject feels like it's logically supporting my view on the subject, add it to the article. 3.1.1. Anything I know the brain does and I have no clue on how can a computer do, will automatically feel like it supports my conclusion. Since I'm pretty clueless as to how computers work in general, most things are actually going to seem like something a computer can't do. 3.2. Otherwise, ignore this and keep going on to the next example.

jacobmoe 8y ago

Funny that "computer" was originally a metaphor applied to the machine from the human occupation.

cuspy 8y ago

Models are not equivalent to the phenomena they describe. Computational models are not an exception to this. There is not even a single "part" or "function" of the brain that we fully, exhaustively understand through a computational explanation. All claims of certainty are premature. What's really fascinating and really needs the attention of historians and anthropologists is why in this current historical moment so many STEM educated people who are otherwise very bright end up confused about this. Maybe the answer is obvious though.

dang 8y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729499

8bitsrule 8y ago

The author mentions Beethoven. Consider what a virtuoso pianist must go through to create a performance of a 40-minute-long sonata. Yes, the performance includes her personal interpretation of what's written on a piece of paper. It is almost certainly influenced by performances others have created. But when it comes to the individual notes, their sequence had damn well better be literally correct for the entire performance. If not, someone in the audience will certainly notice that one flubbed note. So in learning the work, "she was changed in some way" all right. As some members of the audience had been ... identically. And that 'some way' certainly resembles pulling bytes out of 'storage'.

boazbarak 8y ago

Might be an interesting experiment to train a neural network to distinguish between different currencies, and then visualize the features that correspond to the “one dollar neuron”. It might turn out not that far from the drawings of the author’s students.

ilaksh 8y ago

This article would have been more relevant several decades ago when AI research started. But now I think it's mainly a strawman argument because the models are more realistic and different from what he is talking about.

anticycle 8y ago

Worst article I have ever seen on Hacker News.

bkdbkd 8y ago

Meta question: Since this article is a repost and the comments from 2016 and 2019 say the article is largely incorrect, by what process did it make it to the front page. - tl;dr: this is a repost, and panned article, how's it here?