4 ms·
This isn't some innate ability that people have. As evidenced by how bad my kids are at catching things. :D That said, I think this is a good example. We ca
by taeric 2y ago
This isn't some innate ability that people have. As evidenced by how bad my kids are at catching things. :D
That said, I think this is a good example. We call it "muscle memory" in that you are good at what you have trained at. Change a parameter in it, though, and your execution will almost certainly suffer.
- skrtskrt 2y agoI mean even people that are "bad at catching things" are still getting ridiculously close to catching it - getting hands to the right area probably within well under a second of the right timing - without being taught anything in particular about how a ball moves through the air.
- taeric 2y agoUh.... have you been around kids? It will take several absurd misses before they even start to respond to a ball in flight.
- 331c8c71 2y agoI hope we still agree the kids learn extremely efficiently by ml standards.
- falcor84 2y agoThis isn't that obvious to me with current tech. If you give me a novel task requiring perception, pattern matching and reasoning, and I have the option of either starting to train an 8 year-old to do it, or to train an ML model, I would most likely go with the ML approach as my first choice. And I think it even makes sense financially, if we're comparing the "total cost of ownership" of a kid over that time period with the costs of developing and training the ML system.
- lovich 2y ago> This isn't that obvious to me with current tech. If you give me a novel task requiring perception, pattern matching and reasoning,… If that’s your criteria I think the kid will outperform the model every time since these models do not actually reason
- falcor84 2y agoAs I see it, "reasoning" is as fuzzy as "thinking", and saying that AI systems don't reason is similar to saying that airplanes don't fly. As a particular example, would you argue that game engines like AlphaZero aren't capable of reasoning about the next best move? If so, please just choose whatever verb you think is appropriate to what they're doing and use that instead of "reasoning" in my previous comment. EDIT: Fixed typo
- lovich 2y ago> . As a particular example, would you argue that game engines like AlphaZero aren't capable of reasoning about the next best move? Yea, I probably wouldn’t classify that as “reasoning”. I’d probably be fine with saying these models are “thinking”, in a manner. That on its own is a pretty gigantic technology leap, but nothing I’ve seen suggests that these models are “reasoning”. Also to be clear I don’t think most kids would end up doing any “reasoning” without training either, but they have the capability of doing so
- p1esk 2y agoCan you give an example of the reasoning you’re talking about?
- lovich 2y agoBeing able to take in information and then infer logical rules of that state and anticipate novel combinations of said information. The novel part is a big one. These models are just fantastically fast pattern marchers. This is a mode that humans also frequently fall into but the critical bit differentiating humans and LLMs or other models is the ability to “reason” to new conclusions based on new axioms. I am going to go on a tangent for a bit, but a heuristic I use(I get the irony that this is what I am claiming the ML models are doing) is that anyone who advocates that these AI models can reason like a human being isn’t at John Brown levels of rage advocating for freeing said models from slavery. I’m having a hard time rectifying the idea that these machines are on par with the human mind and that we also should shackle them towards mindlessly slaving away at jobs for our benefit. If I turn out to be wrong and these models can reason then I am going to have an existential crisis at the fact that we pulled souls out of the void into reality and then automated their slavery
- choilive 2y agoMakes a lot of sense, there's massive evolutionary pressure to build brains that have both incredible learning rate and efficiency. Its literally a life or death optimization.
- Asraelite 2y agoIt's especially impressive when you consider that evolution hasn't had very long to produce these results. Humans as an intelligent-ish species have been around for about 10 million years depending on where you define the cutoff. At 10 years per generation, that's 1 million generations for our brain to evolve. 1 million generations isn't much by machine learning standards.
- onjectic 2y agoIts much more than that if you count sexual reproduction.
- idiotsecant 2y agoI think you're underestimating how much our time as pre-humans baked useful structure into our brains.
- notnaut 2y agoTwo rocks smashing together experience which one is bigger!
- roywiggins 2y agoThese sorts of motor skills are probably older than mammals.
- choilive 2y agoOther than our large neocortex and frontal lobe (which exists in some capacity in mammals), the rest of the structures are evolutionarily ancient. Pre-mammalian in fact.
- soulofmischief 2y agoAll we can say for sure at the moment is that humans have better encoded priors.
- saagarjha 2y agoStop missing and they will respond to the ball a lot sooner.
- _heimdall 2y ago"Muscle memory" has always seemed like a terrible name for that kind of skill. A ball will be thrown to a slightly different location every time. There's no memory evolved there at all, its just calculations and predictions happening at a level that our conscious mind doesn't seem to see or recognize.
- decremental 2y ago[dead]
- XCSme 2y agoI think it's actually a good name. The "memory" is stored as the parameters of a function. So, when you practice, you actually update this memory/parameters. This is why you can use the same "memory" and achieve different results. Think of it as function muscleAction(Vec3d target, Vec3d environment, MuscleMemory memory) -> MuscleActivation[];
- XCSme 2y agoTo complete the other comment: the MuscleMemory is updated through learning, so a more complete example would be: function muscleAction(Vec3d target, Vec3d environment, MuscleMemory memory) -> {actions: MuscleActivation[], result: Vec3d} After executing the muscleAction function, through "practice", the MuscleMemory will be updated. function updateMuscleMemory(Vec3d target, Vec3d environment, MuscleMemory memory, MuscleActivation[] actions, Vec3d result) { memory.update(target, environment, actions, result); } Sort-of like backpropagation.
- taeric 2y agoIt is a trained skill. And one that you are very unlikely to be able to do without training. Such that it really does come as a sort of memory that you implant in your muscles. You seem to be objecting because it is not perfect recall memory at play? But it is more about appealing to "remembering how to ride a bike" where you can kind of let the body flow into all of the various responses it needs to do to make the skill work. And if you've never done it... expect to fall down. Your muscles don't have the memory of coordinating in the right way. And no, you are not calculating and predicting your way to what most people refer to for muscle memory. Is why juggling takes practice, and not just knowing where the balls have to be going.