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As you appeal to Programmers: do you believe quicksort is a general sorting algorithm? Would it still be a general sorting algorithm if someone had just develo

by feral 7y ago

As you appeal to Programmers: do you believe quicksort is a general sorting algorithm? Would it still be a general sorting algorithm if someone had just developed it and used it solely to sort numbers between 1 and 100? It would be. Why do you think you need to a general environment to develop a general algorithm? No one is arguing human rationality is unbounded. But our intelligence generalizes, in a practical sense, to a great many more tasks than any computer algorithm I'm aware of. Mainstream psychologists believe in general intelligence. They even attempt to measure components of it, with good prediction of performance on unseen tasks. I think there's a big burden if you want to argue it doesn't exist.

visarga 7y ago
> Why do you think you need to a general environment to develop a general algorithm? Because intelligence is not intrinsic to the agent but the result of the agent trying to maximise rewards in an environment. In the end the driving force is survival - the agent needs only to survive, any method would do. So as soon as it overcomes a challenge it stops evolving and turns to exploiting. And the list of challenges that threaten survival does not scale to infinity. Anytime you think about intelligence you need to also think about the environment and the task otherwise it is meaningless.
- omnicognate 7y ago
  You state this as if it's fact but it's a point of view, not necessarily wrong but not proven either. More to the point, it's circular: "intelligence is not intrinsic to the agent but the result of the agent trying to maximise rewards in an environment" is a statement that the human mind operates on the same principles as ML algorithms. If you assume this, then not surprisingly it follows that ML algorithms can in principle do anything the human mind can do. Not everybody agrees and the question has not been empirically settled.

by feral 7y ago

visarga 7y ago

> Why do you think you need to a general environment to develop a general algorithm? Because intelligence is not intrinsic to the agent but the result of the agent trying to maximise rewards in an environment. In the end the driving force is survival - the agent needs only to survive, any method would do. So as soon as it overcomes a challenge it stops evolving and turns to exploiting. And the list of challenges that threaten survival does not scale to infinity. Anytime you think about intelligence you need to also think about the environment and the task otherwise it is meaningless.

omnicognate 7y ago
You state this as if it's fact but it's a point of view, not necessarily wrong but not proven either. More to the point, it's circular: "intelligence is not intrinsic to the agent but the result of the agent trying to maximise rewards in an environment" is a statement that the human mind operates on the same principles as ML algorithms. If you assume this, then not surprisingly it follows that ML algorithms can in principle do anything the human mind can do. Not everybody agrees and the question has not been empirically settled.