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I was reading, waiting for the mention to IBM Watson... and here it comes! I'm so tired of reading how Watson is a step toward Artificial General Intelligence,

• mindcrime 13y ago
  People must really understand that Watson is, like almost any successful AI (not AGI) product today, "just" a huge statistical pattern matching machine. Arguably, that's all a human brain is as well. I don't want to start some big debate here over symbolic reasoning versus statistical pattern matching, but there seems to be quite a bit of contemporary thought along the lines of our brains being largely based on "pattern matching" as a foundational mechanism.
  • wlievens 13y ago
    It can however only do one flavour of pattern matching whereas we combine our mental facilities dynamically. And to wnticipate your "well, that's nothing a computer can't do"... show me any work in the direction of serious AGI!
    • mindcrime 13y ago
      Without an agreed upon definition of "in the direction of" and "AGI", it's hard to have a good conversation about this. For my purposes, I do consider Watson a step in that direction. How big of a step is certainly open to question, but I do believe it's a step nonetheless.
      • wlievens 13y ago
        I don't. It's just our decade's version of deep blue. A pretty damn good calculator, but zero steps in the direction of a mind. It lacks 'common sense', for want of a better term.
        • mindcrime 13y ago
          IF we take it as given that an AGI must think exactly like a human, then I might say I agree with you. We aren't necessarily close to emulating a human being in software, and I'm actually doubtful we will for a VERY long time. BUT... if we only care about the outcome and the utility of the AGI, and don't expect it to be fully "human like" then I think that Watson (and Deep Blue, etc.) do represent steps on that road. You can probably guess that I lean towards the latter viewpoint. I fall back on the oldchestnut that "We didn't build airplanes that fly by flapping their wings like birds, but they fly nonetheless" as an analogy. We may not build machines that think like humans, but they will still be intelligent, nonetheless.
          • wlievens 13y ago
            > if we only care about the outcome and the utility of the AGI, and don't expect it to be fully "human like" I'm not even sure whether that's a meaningful distinction. Searle's Chinese Room et cetera. I'm with you in the wing analogy, I fully agree. I just don't think Watson or Deep Blue is a significant approach even in that direction. Human-like or not, we have certain expectations from our hypothetical AGI in terms of the kind of new problems it can solve without too much help. I guess what it mean is: I think it needs to be able to solve a problem it wasn't designed upfront to solve. No serious system I've ever seen attempts to do that.
            • mindcrime 13y ago
              I guess what it mean is: I think it needs to be able to solve a problem it wasn't designed upfront to solve. No serious system I've ever seen attempts to do that. Fair enough. :-)
            • 13y ago
    • badmofo666 13y ago
      Sounds like what you're talking about is decision theory. Or, when mixed with learning: reinforcement learning. The monte carlo AIXI approximation would be an example. But, it really only works well on small toy problems (I.e. problems where the agent has only a small number of available actions it can perform).
      • wlievens 13y ago
        Thing is, humans come up with new "actions" all the time. If you drop that abstraction, and reduce our actions to "controlling information flow in our bodies" then the action space becomes unfathomably huge.
• deleted 13y ago
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