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Artificial Intelligence as the year 2000 approaches (1992)
- neonate 7y agoFor those who don't know, Maurice Wilkes invented subroutines and microcode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkes
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us now had to be invented by someone. You can easily imagine an alternate history where computing would look totally differently.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us now had to be invented by someone. This is just the anthropic principle. The fact that somebody was first doesn't mean something wasn't obvious. I like to complain about De Morgan's Laws, which state that: (1) If neither of two things is true, then they're both false. (And vice versa.) (2) If two things aren't both true, then one or both of them are false. (And vice versa.) Augustus De Morgan lived in the 1800s, but obviously these laws were well known for many millennia before him. Having these laws named after you is the honorable-mention-in-the-Special-Olympics of making discoveries. It's an insult to the concept of naming things after people.
- spectramax 7y agoThat's a brilliant way to argue about it, makes total sense. What would you say is invented by total happenstance and the world would be totally different if the person had not?
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI would say alphabets, languages, religions, fashions. Numbering systems? Is there an advantage in going base 10 vs base 11? Now that I think about it base 8 may be better.
- patrec 7y ago> Is there an advantage in going base 10 vs base 11? Yes, you can divide by powers of two and five and exactly represent the result. When did you last feel an urge to divide something into 11 parts? > Now that I think about it base 8 may be better. Well, that would have given us nicer shutter-times and screw sizes, "Megabytes", max_ints and better floats for money calculations as well as slightly better numerical properties. But personally I think 6 or 30 would have been the way to go. Being able to divide nicely by the first two primes seems pretty practically useful to me.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> When did you last feel an urge to divide something into 11 parts? When did you last feel an urge to divide something into 5 parts?
- spectramax 7y agoArguably, Duodecimal would have been better. 12 is divisble by a large number of factors and it has some more interesting aspects outlined here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal
- jsinai 7y agoI once asked a mathematics professor why so many obvious or natural results (“Cauchy-Swchartz” being the most contentious) are named after people, when something more descriptive would do. His response: “It makes it easier to refer to those theorems by some memorable name.” Not very satisfying but utilitarian.
- tobr 7y agoI’d like to propose Thaumasiotes’ Law: > The fact that somebody was first doesn't mean something wasn't obvious.
- freeflight 7y agoThat reminds me of the argument of whether math is invented or discovered.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 7y agoLots a things are invented multiple times. It's more common that one might presume. I'm generally wary of claim that someone was first to invent fairly obvious things.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoIn physics people will eventually find stuff because they are law of nature. There is no law of nature that subroutines should exist so it’s very possible they would never be invented and people would do things in a different way.
- melling 7y agoVernor Vinge’s 1993 Technological Singularity is worth a read: https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity.html https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity... “ Progress in hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades. Based on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater-than-human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt has pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for thirty years. Just so I'm not guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me be more specific: I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)”
- ggggtez 7y agoWe still have 10 more years to go then. But honestly I'd argue that we have already achieved at least some level of "greater than human" intelligence. Not general intelligence, mind you, but none the less.
- tr352 7y agoWe already did by ‘96 when Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. I’m sure there are other such examples even before that.
- melling 7y agoI’m not sure I would claim because a computer can be a human in a game that it has human level intelligence. We probably need to come to some sort of agreement on how to define human level intelligence.
- ggggtez 7y agoOn topic for the article: I don't think the Turing Test is a very good test at all. It's trivial by having the robot pretend to be stupid, a child, or not a native-speaker. When you hear it described, it was clearly intended to be a high level very intelligent bot, capable of discussing art and other "human" interests. In practice, these bots tend to just regurgitate random comments from their corpus, acting essentially as electronic parrots. Even so, they regularly fool much of the "judges" of these Turing Tests, who themselves probably couldn't have an intelligent conversation about art or poetry to begin with. Humans are on the whole, terrible at detecting deception. The test should be left in history books. We need a real intelligence test.
- holoduke 7y agoOff topic but I found the advertisement quite amusing all the way down in the article. 'ready to run software' :) we got exactly similar ads today from cloud providers like Amazon.
- alatkins 7y agoDoes anyone have an alternate link? I'm getting a PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR.