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Ask a random college freshman in computer science to write a backtracking sudoku solver with coroutines and/or fibers in their language of choice. Oof, only 1 o
by _gabe_ 3y ago
Ask a random college freshman in computer science to write a backtracking sudoku solver with coroutines and/or fibers in their language of choice. Oof, only 1 out of 10 can do it...? I guess 9 out of 10 college freshmen aren't generally intelligent? (I mean, I certainly wasn't very intelligent as a college freshman, but I'm pretty sure that's not the way you're using that word here).
Anyways, these kinds of strawmen always baffle me in regards to AI.
Insert random pseudo trivia that most of the general population wouldn't be able to do, see the AI fail at that specific task. "What did I tell you? The AI definitely isn't generally intelligent yet!"
Everybody is out to prove AI isn't intelligent without first defining what intelligence even is. And when other people rightly point out it can do a lot of stuff, they point to some specific task that it gets 90% of the way there but doesn't get perfect and then triumphantly declare AI isn't intelligent. Crazy.
- climatologist 3y agoI think everyone should have a test in their back pocket for testing claims made by companies making AI tools. Mine is backtracking sudoku solver with constraint propagation but that's because I know LLMs are incapable of recursion and backtracking. Usually people get the point I'm making but sometimes I have to elaborate further. LLMs are cool toys but calling them intelligent is stretching the definition of "intelligent" way too far. It's important to be clear about what the words actually mean because if people start thinking these software systems can be substituted for their own thinking then we end up with all sorts of unnecessary confusion around what they're actually capable of achieving.
- famouswaffles 3y agoAny test a lot of humans will fail is simply not a test of General Intelligence. That should be obvious enough. And GPT-4 does do this in a couple iterations.
- climatologist 3y agoHumans are not generally intelligent.
- IanCal 3y agoThen you have a wildly different bar than the vast majority of the people in any agi conversation and should state this upfront.
- climatologist 3y agoWhat exactly do you want me to state up front? A general intelligence can solve general problems when those problems are formally specified. Sudoku is a good example of a formally specified problem that can be solved by most people but not by LLMs. This is because LLMs and all neural networks are simply DAGs of function which do not support recursion or backtracking. Adding recursion to neural networks has been tried a few times but no one actually knows how to stabilize their dynamics so the industry has settled on feed forward networks with constrained function blocks which have stable dynamics with respect to back propagation of errors.
- IanCal 3y agoI don't understand your question. > What exactly do you want me to state up front? Exactly what was in your comment that I told you to state up front. Most people in a discussion about AI and replacing people are working with a definition of general intelligence that includes humans to a large degree. > This is because LLMs and all neural networks are simply DAGs of function which do not support recursion or backtracking. Without adding external state I can't solve a sudoku puzzle.
- climatologist 3y agoOk great, next time I run into you I'll make sure to remind you that large language models are not intelligent as I conceive of the word "intelligent".