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This isn't a retort to such a well written comment, more just a question as to how you would view http://www.20q.net http://www.20q.net - as I think it's fair t

This isn't a retort to such a well written comment, more just a question as to how you would view http://www.20q.net http://www.20q.net - as I think it's fair to say they've created a system that likely would outperform a 6-7YOHC at performing twenty questions. As to human utility, they did manage to entertain a fairly large number of people with their one off electronic 20q devices.

bane 14y ago
You know, this brings up a very valid point, and in some ways this represents traversing the guts of a kind of simple expert system. Is it useful? Dunno, I suppose if I was in a foreign country and had an object and didn't know what it was, and it could help me identify it, then sure. But the more valuable point is this, what kind of 6-7YOHC answers people's questions? Most children at that age have achieved a kind of self-feeding curiosity and spend most of their time asking "why" questions...slowly populating their own knowledge base provided a convenient and willing human to answer them. In the case of a human, the intelligence precedes the facts. We're wired to desire to build our model of reality. Autodidacticism (on some level) is the default. Our extant models of intelligence (living creatures) aren't pumped full of factoids till one day, sometime before sexual maturity, the spark of intelligence kicks in and off we go! Our fundamental AI approach is literally putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps this is for lack of enough study into building productive self-learning systems? On to 20q: The problem with 20q is that it largely depends on its own internal model fitting yours. With three tries it sort of got one answer right (it guessed stereo speaker when I was thinking head phones) and I was just picking stuff up off of my desk and answering its questions. My guess of where it fell down is that my model of the world might be less firm than its own. Using headphones for example: it asked two interesting questions 13: Is it used by the police? "Sometimes" 14: Does a basketball player use it? "Irrelevant" But my answers could have just as easily been "irrelevant" to both, or "sometimes" to both or "yes" to both and off down a different decision path it goes. A naive better answer from the system at the end of a "round" might be "so I dunno, what is it?" and fit that into its system. But the honest truth is that it would also slowly be populated by junk. Both intentional and unintentional. Fitting everybody's personal model of the world into a single model is only going to fail since even in the best of cases people have similar models of the world they walk around with in their head, but are often grossly different or even contradictory within a single person's model let alone multiple people (don't even get me started with the discussion my wife and I had last night over a topic we were at absolutely opposite ends of)! Yet! People deal with this every day by interacting with multiple people, weighing new input, and either keeping or discarding the information either because it fits well into their existing model, or a vast array of other reasons (forgot, drunk, heard it during an emotional moment, needed it for a test, etc.)...we can even remember negative assertions "a cow is not a moon rocket". So 20q is a great example of a "human who can do this job with a reference" (RAHWCDTJWAR) syndrome. Clever, but ultimately not as useful as just asking somebody.

bane 14y ago

You know, this brings up a very valid point, and in some ways this represents traversing the guts of a kind of simple expert system. Is it useful? Dunno, I suppose if I was in a foreign country and had an object and didn't know what it was, and it could help me identify it, then sure. But the more valuable point is this, what kind of 6-7YOHC answers people's questions? Most children at that age have achieved a kind of self-feeding curiosity and spend most of their time asking "why" questions...slowly populating their own knowledge base provided a convenient and willing human to answer them. In the case of a human, the intelligence precedes the facts. We're wired to desire to build our model of reality. Autodidacticism (on some level) is the default. Our extant models of intelligence (living creatures) aren't pumped full of factoids till one day, sometime before sexual maturity, the spark of intelligence kicks in and off we go! Our fundamental AI approach is literally putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps this is for lack of enough study into building productive self-learning systems? On to 20q: The problem with 20q is that it largely depends on its own internal model fitting yours. With three tries it sort of got one answer right (it guessed stereo speaker when I was thinking head phones) and I was just picking stuff up off of my desk and answering its questions. My guess of where it fell down is that my model of the world might be less firm than its own. Using headphones for example: it asked two interesting questions 13: Is it used by the police? "Sometimes" 14: Does a basketball player use it? "Irrelevant" But my answers could have just as easily been "irrelevant" to both, or "sometimes" to both or "yes" to both and off down a different decision path it goes. A naive better answer from the system at the end of a "round" might be "so I dunno, what is it?" and fit that into its system. But the honest truth is that it would also slowly be populated by junk. Both intentional and unintentional. Fitting everybody's personal model of the world into a single model is only going to fail since even in the best of cases people have similar models of the world they walk around with in their head, but are often grossly different or even contradictory within a single person's model let alone multiple people (don't even get me started with the discussion my wife and I had last night over a topic we were at absolutely opposite ends of)! Yet! People deal with this every day by interacting with multiple people, weighing new input, and either keeping or discarding the information either because it fits well into their existing model, or a vast array of other reasons (forgot, drunk, heard it during an emotional moment, needed it for a test, etc.)...we can even remember negative assertions "a cow is not a moon rocket". So 20q is a great example of a "human who can do this job with a reference" (RAHWCDTJWAR) syndrome. Clever, but ultimately not as useful as just asking somebody.