3 ms·

Should he have introduced some randomization to prevent the repetition of moves?

• falcor84 3y ago
  I'll just put this here: ----------------------------- Sussman attains enlightenment ----------------------------- In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher. “So that the room will be empty.” At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
  • ukuina 3y ago
    I feel dumb, but I do not understand this. Randomization of topology and weights is not a terrible starting point, is it?
    • CamperBob2 3y ago
      Some say that Minsky was responsible for about -50 years of progress in the AI field [1], so they'd say that no, there's not much enlightenment to be found in his work. 1: https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/1288/did-minsky-and-papert-know-that-multi-layer-perceptrons-could-solve-xor https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/1288/did-minsky-and-p...
    • Imnimo 3y ago
      I don't know if my reading is the intended one, but the way I've always interpreted this is not that random initialization is bad. Rather, the error Sussman makes is saying that a randomly initialized network has no preconceptions of how to play. It does - it's just that the preconceptions are randomized and so you don't know what they are. Similarly, closing your eyes does not make the room empty, it just means you don't know what's in it. That said, I don't think my interpretation really matches the intent of the poster above.