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And yet computers continue to perform tasks that were talked about for years as something uniquely human / intelligence driven. This is a nice philosophical deb

And yet computers continue to perform tasks that were talked about for years as something uniquely human / intelligence driven. This is a nice philosophical debate, but in practice I think it falls flat.

mjburgess 5y ago
I dont see any single case of that. Rather in every case the goal posts were moved. Can a computer play chess? No. They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one. That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a move. And likewise everything else. A rock beats a child at finding the path to the bottom of a hill. A rock "outperforms" the child. The challenge was never, literally, getting to the bottom of the hill: that's dumb. The challenge was matching the child's ability to do that anywhere via exploration, curiosity, planning, coordination, and everything else. If you reduce intelligence to merely completing a highly specific task then there is always a shortcut, which uses no intelligence, to solving that task. The ability to build tools which use these shortcuts was never in doubt: we have done that for millenia.
- klmadfejno 5y ago
  > They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one. > That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a move. Uh-huh. And how exactly do you play chess? Do you not, perhaps, think about future states resultant from your next move? Also, Alpha Zero, with its ability to do a tree search entirely removed, achieves an ELO score of greater than 3,000 in chess, which isn't even the intended design of the algorithm. A rock will frequently fail to get the to bottom of a hill due to local minimums vs. global minimums. A child will too sometimes.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    > Uh-huh. And how exactly do you play chess? Do you not, perhaps, think about future states resultant from your next move? Not quite. You'd need to look into how people play chess. It has vastly more to do with present positioning and making high-quality evaluations of present board configuration. > rock will frequently fail to get the to bottom of a hill due to local minimums Indeed. And what is a system which merely falls into a dataset? A NN is just a system for remembering a dataset and interpolating a line between its points. If you replace a tree search with a database of billions of examples, are you actually solving the problem you were asked to solve? Only if you thought the goal was literally to win the game; or to find the route to the bottom of the hill. That was never the challenge -- we all know there are shotcuts to merely winning. Intelligence is in how you win, not that you have.
    - klmadfejno 5y ago
      > Not quite. You'd need to look into how people play chess. It has vastly more to do with present positioning and making high-quality evaluations of present board configuration. That is what Alpha Zero does when you remove tree search > A NN is just a system for remembering a dataset and interpolating a line between its points. Interpolating a line between points == making inferences on new situations based on past experience. > If you replace a tree search with a database of billions of examples, are you actually solving the problem you were asked to solve? The NN still performs well on positions it hasn't see before. It's not a database. The fact that the NN learned from billions of examples is irrelevant. Age limits aside, a human could have billions of examples of experience as well. > A NN is just a system for remembering a dataset and interpolating a line between its points. So are human brains. That is the very nature of how decisions are made. > Only if you thought the goal was literally to win the game; or to find the route to the bottom of the hill. That was never the challenge So then why did you bring it up as an example other than to move goal posts yet again? I can build a bot to explore new areas too. Probably better than humans can. Any novel perspective that a human brings, is, by definition, learned elsewhere, just like a bot. > Intelligence is in how you win, not that you have. Sure, and being a dumbass is in how you convince yourself you're superior when you lose every game. There are many open challenges in AI. Making systems better at learning quickly and generalizing context is a very hard problem. But at the same time, intellectual tasks are being not only automated, but vastly improved by AI in many areas. Moving goalposts on what was clearly thought labor in the past is just handwaving philosophy to blind yourself from something real and actively happening. The DOTA bots don't adapt to unfamiliar strategies by their opponents, and yet, they're still good at DOTA.
- Falling3 5y ago
  > Can a computer play chess? No. > They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one. This is a perfect example of moving the goal posts. The objective was never to simulate a human playing chess.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    The objective was to build an intelligent machine. Games were chosen as they, in humans, require intelligence. They thought that AI would come out of building systems that can replace humans: sure, but only insofar as you preserve the use of intelligence. If you replace with a shortcut, you havent built an intelligent machine.
    - klmadfejno 5y ago
      The objective was to make a machine that could beat anybody at chess. Nobody on the Alpha Zero team believes Alpha Zero is an example of general AI. Teaching a system to understand a complex system is a necessary subcomponent of general intelligence.
      - mjburgess 5y ago
        > Teaching a system to understand a complex system is a necessary subcomponent of general intelligence. This is my point. Weak AI is not a component of general AI. A chess game futhers the project zero amount. General intelligence is a way of being embedded in an environment; is the mechanism of furnishing narrow intelligence with content. It is not a formal challenge, it's at best an engineering one. And a bioengineering one, in my view.
  - andrewprock 5y ago
    The moving of the goal posts is being done by those who claim that chess algorithm are in any sense intelligent. The same holds for artificial intelligence broadly. It is as far from intelligence as a can opener.

mjburgess 5y ago

I dont see any single case of that. Rather in every case the goal posts were moved. Can a computer play chess? No. They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one. That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a move. And likewise everything else. A rock beats a child at finding the path to the bottom of a hill. A rock "outperforms" the child. The challenge was never, literally, getting to the bottom of the hill: that's dumb. The challenge was matching the child's ability to do that anywhere via exploration, curiosity, planning, coordination, and everything else. If you reduce intelligence to merely completing a highly specific task then there is always a shortcut, which uses no intelligence, to solving that task. The ability to build tools which use these shortcuts was never in doubt: we have done that for millenia.

klmadfejno 5y ago
> They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one. > That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a move. Uh-huh. And how exactly do you play chess? Do you not, perhaps, think about future states resultant from your next move? Also, Alpha Zero, with its ability to do a tree search entirely removed, achieves an ELO score of greater than 3,000 in chess, which isn't even the intended design of the algorithm. A rock will frequently fail to get the to bottom of a hill due to local minimums vs. global minimums. A child will too sometimes.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  > Uh-huh. And how exactly do you play chess? Do you not, perhaps, think about future states resultant from your next move? Not quite. You'd need to look into how people play chess. It has vastly more to do with present positioning and making high-quality evaluations of present board configuration. > rock will frequently fail to get the to bottom of a hill due to local minimums Indeed. And what is a system which merely falls into a dataset? A NN is just a system for remembering a dataset and interpolating a line between its points. If you replace a tree search with a database of billions of examples, are you actually solving the problem you were asked to solve? Only if you thought the goal was literally to win the game; or to find the route to the bottom of the hill. That was never the challenge -- we all know there are shotcuts to merely winning. Intelligence is in how you win, not that you have.
  - klmadfejno 5y ago
    > Not quite. You'd need to look into how people play chess. It has vastly more to do with present positioning and making high-quality evaluations of present board configuration. That is what Alpha Zero does when you remove tree search > A NN is just a system for remembering a dataset and interpolating a line between its points. Interpolating a line between points == making inferences on new situations based on past experience. > If you replace a tree search with a database of billions of examples, are you actually solving the problem you were asked to solve? The NN still performs well on positions it hasn't see before. It's not a database. The fact that the NN learned from billions of examples is irrelevant. Age limits aside, a human could have billions of examples of experience as well. > A NN is just a system for remembering a dataset and interpolating a line between its points. So are human brains. That is the very nature of how decisions are made. > Only if you thought the goal was literally to win the game; or to find the route to the bottom of the hill. That was never the challenge So then why did you bring it up as an example other than to move goal posts yet again? I can build a bot to explore new areas too. Probably better than humans can. Any novel perspective that a human brings, is, by definition, learned elsewhere, just like a bot. > Intelligence is in how you win, not that you have. Sure, and being a dumbass is in how you convince yourself you're superior when you lose every game. There are many open challenges in AI. Making systems better at learning quickly and generalizing context is a very hard problem. But at the same time, intellectual tasks are being not only automated, but vastly improved by AI in many areas. Moving goalposts on what was clearly thought labor in the past is just handwaving philosophy to blind yourself from something real and actively happening. The DOTA bots don't adapt to unfamiliar strategies by their opponents, and yet, they're still good at DOTA.
Falling3 5y ago
> Can a computer play chess? No. > They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one. This is a perfect example of moving the goal posts. The objective was never to simulate a human playing chess.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  The objective was to build an intelligent machine. Games were chosen as they, in humans, require intelligence. They thought that AI would come out of building systems that can replace humans: sure, but only insofar as you preserve the use of intelligence. If you replace with a shortcut, you havent built an intelligent machine.
  - klmadfejno 5y ago
    The objective was to make a machine that could beat anybody at chess. Nobody on the Alpha Zero team believes Alpha Zero is an example of general AI. Teaching a system to understand a complex system is a necessary subcomponent of general intelligence.
    - mjburgess 5y ago
      > Teaching a system to understand a complex system is a necessary subcomponent of general intelligence. This is my point. Weak AI is not a component of general AI. A chess game futhers the project zero amount. General intelligence is a way of being embedded in an environment; is the mechanism of furnishing narrow intelligence with content. It is not a formal challenge, it's at best an engineering one. And a bioengineering one, in my view.
- andrewprock 5y ago
  The moving of the goal posts is being done by those who claim that chess algorithm are in any sense intelligent. The same holds for artificial intelligence broadly. It is as far from intelligence as a can opener.