4 ms·

So Good Old Fashioned AI[1] is the new hot underdog AI thing now? I seriously don't understand the praise of Hostadter in the article and in the comments here,

by stiff 13y ago

So Good Old Fashioned AI[1] is the new hot underdog AI thing now? I seriously don't understand the praise of Hostadter in the article and in the comments here, and the criticism of the mainstream AI research, especially it is very hard to find any precise details of what he does and what are the outcomes. There have been attempts to understand intelligence with intelligence (logic, symbols, reasoning etc.) for 30 years, to not much effect, now AI and machine learning are advancing quite steadily, so why the snark? All evidence suggests that the way the brain itself learns things is statistical and probabilistic in nature. There are also new disciplines now, like Probabilistic Graphical Models, which are free of some of the traditional downsides of purely statistical methods, in that they can be interpreted and that human-understandable knowledge can be extracted from them. This is something that really seems promising, and to some extent is an union of the old and new approaches, despite the claims of a big division, but it is hard to see much premise in purely symbolic methods invented merely by some guy somewhere thinking very hard. I for one am very happy that people seek inspiration in the way human brain works, that's what science is, if you just come up with things without consulting the real world it's not science, it's philosophy, the one discipline that has yet to produce a single result. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI

hharrison 13y ago
There are more divisions than the article can get into, of course. I think the main one is between AI to solve engineering problems and AI to better understand the mind. The article is about doing the latter when everyone else's definition of AI is the former. What you're talking about, I think, is various approaches within the latter group of researchers. I defended Hofstadter in another reply because I find his goals worthwhile in and of themselves - in a "basic research" sense. Discarding anything that's not an optimal solution - the attitude taken by a couple of responses here - ignores a whole lot of interesting science, and as a scientist it bothers me quite a bit. That said, once we're talking about the goal of understanding the human mind, GOFAI is, to be sure, incredibly old-fashioned, and you won't find me defending Hofstadter anymore as far as his approach. His goal is a worthwhile one, but you're right that his approach shouldn't really be considered an 'underdog'. Personally, I think the best hope for understanding what intelligence is, in a general sense, comes from non-equilibrium thermodynamics, as in the sort of research goin on here: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/heco20/24/1#.UmlRN_mfihM http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/heco20/24/1#.UmlRN_mfihM but that's a can of worms for another post. As an aside, regarding your last comment, I completely disagree on your view of philsoophy. It may not have produced results but it has guided science. But I agree with the thrust of your sentiment: an AI researcher with the goal of understanding the human mind should be spending as much time studying humans (as in, doing Psych or Cognitive Science experiments) as programming AIs.
jblow 13y ago
Hofstadter's stuff is not remotely GOFAI. Have you read his books or looked at any of the projects?
- hharrison 13y ago
  I haven't checked any of his recent projects, but from his books he's firmly rooted in the symbolic tradition. He adds some interesting wrinkles, sure, but wouldn't he still be diametrically opposed to someone like Rodney Brooks? http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/000437029190053M http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00043702919... (Intelligence Without Representation)
  - joe_the_user 13y ago
    No, you're wrong. Hofstader begins with symbolics but definitively goes off them. The point of something like a "strange loop" is that it can't be encompassed by an ordinary symbolic system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
    - hharrison 13y ago
      You're right, and flipping through my copy of I Am a Strange Loop for the first time in a while I find some things that are reminiscent of non-computational theories. I guess I was/am caught up on the computationalism vs. non-computationalism debate and am conflating GOFAI with everyone working in a computationalist framework. Hofstadter pushes the boundaries, but he's still a computationalist. For someone who takes the idea of a system that's impossible to model further, IMO, check out the biologist Robert Rosen's Life Itself and Essays on Life Itself. He pushes more in the direction of complex systems theory than self-reference (maybe a physics version of the same idea?) but his writings are brilliant. Less fun than Hofstadter's, but more rigorous and with a necessary appreciation of the biological and physical sciences. Anyways, I'm rambling.
    - dnautics 13y ago
      it's not just strange loops. Read "Creative Analogies". The 'copycat' program, in particular. Those algorithms were solving problems that watson never would be able to do: Problems that require genuinely creative thinking, especially in the face of open-ended, indefinite answer domains.
maaku 13y ago
> it's philosophy, the one discipline that has yet to produce a single result. I agree that the signal-to-noise ratio in philosophy is very low. (I also strongly agree with the rest of your comment.) But let's be fair: it was philosophy that produced 1. Formal logic 2. Occam's razor 3. Scientific method 4. Church-Turing thesis
- gjm11 13y ago
  1. I suppose the earliest system of formal logic was the syllogistic, but that's a long way from what we call formal logic now and it's not at all clear that it ever did anyone any good. Formal logic of the modern kind has a history going something like: Leibniz (mathematician), Boole (mathematician), Frege (both mathematician and philosopher), Peano (mathematician), Russell (both mathematician and philosopher), etc. (by Russell's time most of the architecture of modern formal logic is in place) and it looks to me as if -- if we really must engage in these boundary disputes -- it's more down to mathematicians than to philosophers. 2. Yeah, William of Ockham was a philosopher. Score one for philosophy. 3. It looks to me as if almost everything important in the history of the scientific method is down to scientists rather than philosophers -- though, since the word "scientist" wasn't coined until the 19th century and disciplinary boundaries used to be more porous than they are now, they were often called "natural philosophers" and often did a certain amount of what-we-now-call-philosophy as well as what-we-now-call-science. Francis Bacon is the usual chief suspect for introducing something close to the modern scientific method. He was an experimental scientist as well as a philosopher (though, it seems, not a particularly good one). Galileo was a scientist. Newton was a scientist. I suppose you might want to go back to Aristotle (though I wouldn't) -- but, actually, Aristotle was trying to do science as well as philosophy. 4. Since both Church and Turing were both trained and employed as mathematicians, it seems rather strange to credit the Church-Turing thesis to philosophy. (So far as I can tell, all the other important people in its history -- Goedel, Kleene, Post, Rosser, etc. -- were mathematicians too.) You might consider these topics philosophical by definition. If so, the conclusion would seem to be that even philosophy is often best done by scientists and mathematicians, which doesn't speak well for philosophy as a discipline.
  - nooneelse 13y ago
NhanH 13y ago
Technically speaking, philosophy will never be able to produce any result, the moment it can, the philosophical problem turned into a scientific problem. But answering isn't actually philosophy's job. It's mostly for producing question, and science will in turn answer those questions (or make it irrelevant).
- glenra 13y ago
  Artificial Intelligence is like that too - it can't produce "intelligence" because as soon as scientists figure out a way to do stuff that looks like intelligent behavior - say, speech recognition or winning at Jeopardy - that immediately stops being considered an example of AI. Chess was considered "an AI problem" - and quite a hard one - back when nobody knew how to write a program that could play a good game. Now chess is beneath consideration because (a) programs can play it, (b) we actually understand how those programs work.
joe_the_user 13y ago
I seriously don't understand the praise of Hofstadter in the article and in the comments here, and the criticism of the mainstream AI research, especially it is very hard to find any precise details of what he does and what are the outcomes. Uh Yeah, you don't understand "Hostadter", you can't be bothered to spell his name right, but you're willing to attack him. Just FYI, Hofstadter was never in the mainstream of GOFAI but always advocate something of a different path; a path not taken - for good or ill but not the same path as you caricature. You might take notice that your link makes no mention of Hofstadter, for example. Hofstadter's work on analogies, for example, was by no means a pure symbolic approach. And the rest your post is thus ... ignorant and irrelevant [Edit: by the fact that it's not about Hofstadter, just someone's critique of someone else' AI grr]. Kind of an embarrassment having it here.
- stiff 13y ago
  I will listen with great interest if you then care to explain to me what is the great discovery Hofstadter made in the field of AI. I believe he is rooted in the GOFAI tradition, because he tries to understand intelligence by introspection, and I happen to believe this is impossible, since what we are aware of consciously is just a surface level result of processes in the brain we are completely unconscious of. Whatever descriptions of his work I can find, sound pretty much like GOFAI too - you just come up with a program that does something supposedly intelligent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_Analogies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_Ana... I am also not attacking him, I am just sceptical, as I would be if someone who is not working in mainstream physics and is ignored by it claimed a breakthrough in understanding matter or whatever.

by stiff 13y ago

hharrison 13y ago

There are more divisions than the article can get into, of course. I think the main one is between AI to solve engineering problems and AI to better understand the mind. The article is about doing the latter when everyone else's definition of AI is the former. What you're talking about, I think, is various approaches within the latter group of researchers. I defended Hofstadter in another reply because I find his goals worthwhile in and of themselves - in a "basic research" sense. Discarding anything that's not an optimal solution - the attitude taken by a couple of responses here - ignores a whole lot of interesting science, and as a scientist it bothers me quite a bit. That said, once we're talking about the goal of understanding the human mind, GOFAI is, to be sure, incredibly old-fashioned, and you won't find me defending Hofstadter anymore as far as his approach. His goal is a worthwhile one, but you're right that his approach shouldn't really be considered an 'underdog'. Personally, I think the best hope for understanding what intelligence is, in a general sense, comes from non-equilibrium thermodynamics, as in the sort of research goin on here: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/heco20/24/1#.UmlRN_mfihM http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/heco20/24/1#.UmlRN_mfihM but that's a can of worms for another post. As an aside, regarding your last comment, I completely disagree on your view of philsoophy. It may not have produced results but it has guided science. But I agree with the thrust of your sentiment: an AI researcher with the goal of understanding the human mind should be spending as much time studying humans (as in, doing Psych or Cognitive Science experiments) as programming AIs.

jblow 13y ago

Hofstadter's stuff is not remotely GOFAI. Have you read his books or looked at any of the projects?

hharrison 13y ago
I haven't checked any of his recent projects, but from his books he's firmly rooted in the symbolic tradition. He adds some interesting wrinkles, sure, but wouldn't he still be diametrically opposed to someone like Rodney Brooks? http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/000437029190053M http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00043702919... (Intelligence Without Representation)
- joe_the_user 13y ago
  No, you're wrong. Hofstader begins with symbolics but definitively goes off them. The point of something like a "strange loop" is that it can't be encompassed by an ordinary symbolic system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
  - hharrison 13y ago
    You're right, and flipping through my copy of I Am a Strange Loop for the first time in a while I find some things that are reminiscent of non-computational theories. I guess I was/am caught up on the computationalism vs. non-computationalism debate and am conflating GOFAI with everyone working in a computationalist framework. Hofstadter pushes the boundaries, but he's still a computationalist. For someone who takes the idea of a system that's impossible to model further, IMO, check out the biologist Robert Rosen's Life Itself and Essays on Life Itself. He pushes more in the direction of complex systems theory than self-reference (maybe a physics version of the same idea?) but his writings are brilliant. Less fun than Hofstadter's, but more rigorous and with a necessary appreciation of the biological and physical sciences. Anyways, I'm rambling.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    it's not just strange loops. Read "Creative Analogies". The 'copycat' program, in particular. Those algorithms were solving problems that watson never would be able to do: Problems that require genuinely creative thinking, especially in the face of open-ended, indefinite answer domains.

maaku 13y ago

> it's philosophy, the one discipline that has yet to produce a single result. I agree that the signal-to-noise ratio in philosophy is very low. (I also strongly agree with the rest of your comment.) But let's be fair: it was philosophy that produced 1. Formal logic 2. Occam's razor 3. Scientific method 4. Church-Turing thesis

gjm11 13y ago
1. I suppose the earliest system of formal logic was the syllogistic, but that's a long way from what we call formal logic now and it's not at all clear that it ever did anyone any good. Formal logic of the modern kind has a history going something like: Leibniz (mathematician), Boole (mathematician), Frege (both mathematician and philosopher), Peano (mathematician), Russell (both mathematician and philosopher), etc. (by Russell's time most of the architecture of modern formal logic is in place) and it looks to me as if -- if we really must engage in these boundary disputes -- it's more down to mathematicians than to philosophers. 2. Yeah, William of Ockham was a philosopher. Score one for philosophy. 3. It looks to me as if almost everything important in the history of the scientific method is down to scientists rather than philosophers -- though, since the word "scientist" wasn't coined until the 19th century and disciplinary boundaries used to be more porous than they are now, they were often called "natural philosophers" and often did a certain amount of what-we-now-call-philosophy as well as what-we-now-call-science. Francis Bacon is the usual chief suspect for introducing something close to the modern scientific method. He was an experimental scientist as well as a philosopher (though, it seems, not a particularly good one). Galileo was a scientist. Newton was a scientist. I suppose you might want to go back to Aristotle (though I wouldn't) -- but, actually, Aristotle was trying to do science as well as philosophy. 4. Since both Church and Turing were both trained and employed as mathematicians, it seems rather strange to credit the Church-Turing thesis to philosophy. (So far as I can tell, all the other important people in its history -- Goedel, Kleene, Post, Rosser, etc. -- were mathematicians too.) You might consider these topics philosophical by definition. If so, the conclusion would seem to be that even philosophy is often best done by scientists and mathematicians, which doesn't speak well for philosophy as a discipline.
- nooneelse 13y ago

NhanH 13y ago

Technically speaking, philosophy will never be able to produce any result, the moment it can, the philosophical problem turned into a scientific problem. But answering isn't actually philosophy's job. It's mostly for producing question, and science will in turn answer those questions (or make it irrelevant).

glenra 13y ago
Artificial Intelligence is like that too - it can't produce "intelligence" because as soon as scientists figure out a way to do stuff that looks like intelligent behavior - say, speech recognition or winning at Jeopardy - that immediately stops being considered an example of AI. Chess was considered "an AI problem" - and quite a hard one - back when nobody knew how to write a program that could play a good game. Now chess is beneath consideration because (a) programs can play it, (b) we actually understand how those programs work.

joe_the_user 13y ago

I seriously don't understand the praise of Hofstadter in the article and in the comments here, and the criticism of the mainstream AI research, especially it is very hard to find any precise details of what he does and what are the outcomes. Uh Yeah, you don't understand "Hostadter", you can't be bothered to spell his name right, but you're willing to attack him. Just FYI, Hofstadter was never in the mainstream of GOFAI but always advocate something of a different path; a path not taken - for good or ill but not the same path as you caricature. You might take notice that your link makes no mention of Hofstadter, for example. Hofstadter's work on analogies, for example, was by no means a pure symbolic approach. And the rest your post is thus ... ignorant and irrelevant [Edit: by the fact that it's not about Hofstadter, just someone's critique of someone else' AI grr]. Kind of an embarrassment having it here.

stiff 13y ago
I will listen with great interest if you then care to explain to me what is the great discovery Hofstadter made in the field of AI. I believe he is rooted in the GOFAI tradition, because he tries to understand intelligence by introspection, and I happen to believe this is impossible, since what we are aware of consciously is just a surface level result of processes in the brain we are completely unconscious of. Whatever descriptions of his work I can find, sound pretty much like GOFAI too - you just come up with a program that does something supposedly intelligent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_Analogies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_Ana... I am also not attacking him, I am just sceptical, as I would be if someone who is not working in mainstream physics and is ignored by it claimed a breakthrough in understanding matter or whatever.