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Come up with an AI that can play the game of Go well. Then we'll talk.

by cmccabe 14y ago

jerf 14y ago
That's just a snide comment, not a useful one. The difficulty of symbolic/logic problems can be made unboundedly great by construction. Nobody ever denied that. The point is that something like crossing a room and picking up a pencil seemed easy, and to this day is still a significant achievement for robotics, still requiring fairly controlled circumstances. It can be difficult to understand this from our present-day perspective where we have so thoroughly internalized this idea that it has apparently passed into invisibility for some of us. Go back and read Asimov's robots work, in which he has robots walking, talking, socially interacting with humans, even pondering great ethical conundrums, while at the same time it requires massive resources to attain the raw numerical computational power available to a Commodore 64.
- cmccabe 14y ago
  Just because you discovered a few cool hacks that happened to work well in very specific problem domains doesn't mean you've "solved" symbolic thought. The way a chess program works is not the way humans play chess. It does a brute-force search, rather than learning patterns. Go is a good example of a game that can't effectively be brute-forced. There are a lot of other examples out there; that was just the one I happened to pick. The point is that something like crossing a room and picking up a pencil seemed easy, and to this day is still a significant achievement for robotics, still requiring fairly controlled circumstances. Just because you failed to do one thing doesn't mean you succeeded in doing another.
nandemo 14y ago
Some Go programs already play at professional level on 9x9 boards, and amateur mid-dan level on 19x19. That's "playing well" on my book: many people play go for years without reaching that level. Yes, it's still far from the level computer chess was 15 years ago (beating top pros), but they're getting there. And I don't think it will take any major breakthrough in AI itself.

Come up with an AI that can play the game of Go well. Then we'll talk.

by cmccabe 14y ago

Come up with an AI that can play the game of Go well. Then we'll talk.

jerf 14y ago

That's just a snide comment, not a useful one. The difficulty of symbolic/logic problems can be made unboundedly great by construction. Nobody ever denied that. The point is that something like crossing a room and picking up a pencil seemed easy, and to this day is still a significant achievement for robotics, still requiring fairly controlled circumstances. It can be difficult to understand this from our present-day perspective where we have so thoroughly internalized this idea that it has apparently passed into invisibility for some of us. Go back and read Asimov's robots work, in which he has robots walking, talking, socially interacting with humans, even pondering great ethical conundrums, while at the same time it requires massive resources to attain the raw numerical computational power available to a Commodore 64.

cmccabe 14y ago
Just because you discovered a few cool hacks that happened to work well in very specific problem domains doesn't mean you've "solved" symbolic thought. The way a chess program works is not the way humans play chess. It does a brute-force search, rather than learning patterns. Go is a good example of a game that can't effectively be brute-forced. There are a lot of other examples out there; that was just the one I happened to pick. The point is that something like crossing a room and picking up a pencil seemed easy, and to this day is still a significant achievement for robotics, still requiring fairly controlled circumstances. Just because you failed to do one thing doesn't mean you succeeded in doing another.

nandemo 14y ago

Some Go programs already play at professional level on 9x9 boards, and amateur mid-dan level on 19x19. That's "playing well" on my book: many people play go for years without reaching that level. Yes, it's still far from the level computer chess was 15 years ago (beating top pros), but they're getting there. And I don't think it will take any major breakthrough in AI itself.