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I agree hugely that computers are based on hard logic and this makes them poor tools to deal with tasks like 'perception'. I'd also add that most people working

I agree hugely that computers are based on hard logic and this makes them poor tools to deal with tasks like 'perception'. I'd also add that most people working in the field of AI are trained in hard logic, and not at all in the subtleties of the perceptual world (not that there's a university course for this), which probably doesn't help. I'm not so sure you start a good argument though. 'Harder' is all about the tools at hand. If you have the right tools, everything is easy. So to me this is all semantics. To me all the wikipedia page basically says is 'we haven't invented a good artificial tool for generalized, fast perception'. Of course the other way to think about it is that humans and other animals devote generally much larger amounts of physical space (in the brain and otherwise) to subconscious things like perception and subconscious memory than they do to conscious things like logic...

simonh 14y ago
>'Harder' is all about the tools at hand. If you have the right tools, everything is easy. >So to me this is all semantics. To me all the wikipedia page basically says is 'we haven't invented >a good artificial tool for generalized, fast perception' Ok I'll rephrase. "After 30+ years of intense research it has hard to develop the tools to generalised fast perception". Whereas in that time we have developed tools that make higher level reasoning computationally cheap in comparison. But as you yourself say that's just semantics. If you try to do something for over 30 years and make little progress, compared to another area of activity were many of the hard problems are solved in just a few years and the solutions to harder problems keep on coming, that's pretty good evidence that the first problem area is a hard one, however you try to finesse the description of the problems.
- twelvechairs 14y ago
  You skew my words. What I was saying is that you can't say anything is hard if you have the right tools to do it. Not that this hasn't proved hard with our current technology/approach. This was in response to the above post using phrases like "intrinsically harder" and "highly dependent on the representations and models used". Apart from that I agree with you...

simonh 14y ago

>'Harder' is all about the tools at hand. If you have the right tools, everything is easy. >So to me this is all semantics. To me all the wikipedia page basically says is 'we haven't invented >a good artificial tool for generalized, fast perception' Ok I'll rephrase. "After 30+ years of intense research it has hard to develop the tools to generalised fast perception". Whereas in that time we have developed tools that make higher level reasoning computationally cheap in comparison. But as you yourself say that's just semantics. If you try to do something for over 30 years and make little progress, compared to another area of activity were many of the hard problems are solved in just a few years and the solutions to harder problems keep on coming, that's pretty good evidence that the first problem area is a hard one, however you try to finesse the description of the problems.

twelvechairs 14y ago
You skew my words. What I was saying is that you can't say anything is hard if you have the right tools to do it. Not that this hasn't proved hard with our current technology/approach. This was in response to the above post using phrases like "intrinsically harder" and "highly dependent on the representations and models used". Apart from that I agree with you...