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I've always considered Norvig's position pretty much self-evident for anybody who has dealt with real world problems. At the same time, Chomsky is still way mor
by zepolud 14y ago
I've always considered Norvig's position pretty much self-evident for anybody who has dealt with real world problems. At the same time, Chomsky is still way more interesting to read, even if he's wrong. And he's wrong mostly for assuming that unsupervised learning has to be the end result when in fact it could be an intermediate step to more refined symbolic theories.
In any case, this kind of antagonism between the two approaches might be useful as it keeps the field more vital, preventing yet another stagnation.
- AndyNemmity 14y agoBy real world problems you're talking about engineering and not science. Chomsky says Norvig's position is great for engineering, just not science. The whole disagreement stems from the idea that this will help us with a scientific understanding of language or not. The burden is on Norvig's side to prove it, and it hasn't.
- snowwrestler 14y agoI think the phrase "scientific understanding" is essentially qualitative, meaning that humans can disagree about what we "understand" and how "scientific" it is, and there's no objective way to adjudicate that fight. How many physicists really believe they fully understand quantum mechanics? The theory is probablistic and strange but produces very accurate predictions. The true measure of science is matching observations to hypotheses, and in that respect the approach that Norvig defends has demonstrated success. Google's language tools work well much of the time. Watson beat Ken Jennings. Other branches of science are beginning to make more use of "big data" approaches as well. A friend doing post-doctoral research on evolution spends most of his time behind a laptop coding against big sets of digitized genetic information.