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> It works, and it's a marvel of engineering, but it's not "artificial intelligence." It's pretty much a big stack of statistical hacks piled up over the years.

by exit 15y ago

> It works, and it's a marvel of engineering, but it's not "artificial intelligence." It's pretty much a big stack of statistical hacks piled up over the years. i'm not sure about this attitude. it reminds me of a quote by dijkstra: "The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim." why demand that intelligence proceed from a single parsimonious gesture?

jamesrcole 15y ago
I'm not sure I agree with that quote. We can agree that what computers can do these days is quite different to human-style thinking. But to imply what machines can do is somehow different from thinking, just as submarine propulsion is different from swimming, implies that thinking is different from computation. Whether computation, a mechanical process, encompasses what we consider thinking is not a settled question, but I think there's a pretty good case for believing that computation does encompass thinking. [EDIT: wording]
- exit 15y ago
  ? you aren't disagreeing with the quote. just as our sense of what swimming entails is wrongly constrained by our familiarity with specific implementations, beyond "moving about under water", we shouldn't limit "thinking" to mean "activity in a neural network", etc.
Dn_Ab 15y ago
I doubt brandonb thinks anything so simple. His post suggest a strong familiarity with the subject. I believe his emphasis is that previously, much of the structure learning was not discovered by the algorithm but hand tuned and built in manually. The new algorithm would seem to require less work to implement because it uncovered on its own a fair bit of the complex bits that previously had to be tweaked in by experimentation. In this sense we can talk about which is smarter in terms of required hand holding and massaging. The question of what really constitutes intelligence is orthogonal to his post.

by exit 15y ago

jamesrcole 15y ago

I'm not sure I agree with that quote. We can agree that what computers can do these days is quite different to human-style thinking. But to imply what machines can do is somehow different from thinking, just as submarine propulsion is different from swimming, implies that thinking is different from computation. Whether computation, a mechanical process, encompasses what we consider thinking is not a settled question, but I think there's a pretty good case for believing that computation does encompass thinking. [EDIT: wording]

exit 15y ago
? you aren't disagreeing with the quote. just as our sense of what swimming entails is wrongly constrained by our familiarity with specific implementations, beyond "moving about under water", we shouldn't limit "thinking" to mean "activity in a neural network", etc.

Dn_Ab 15y ago

I doubt brandonb thinks anything so simple. His post suggest a strong familiarity with the subject. I believe his emphasis is that previously, much of the structure learning was not discovered by the algorithm but hand tuned and built in manually. The new algorithm would seem to require less work to implement because it uncovered on its own a fair bit of the complex bits that previously had to be tweaked in by experimentation. In this sense we can talk about which is smarter in terms of required hand holding and massaging. The question of what really constitutes intelligence is orthogonal to his post.