3 ms·

Fair enough, but can we imagine a better algorithm?

by elwell 13y ago

rdl 13y ago
I've always assumed any real machine intelligence would be scalable to the point where even if it started at a millionth the functionality of a human, it would end up far surpassing humanity.
- derefr 13y ago
  Why do you believe this? We don't see animals self-improving to become humans (in the "consciously deciding what revisions to make to their mental architecture at each step" sense), so why would you expect electronic animal-level minds to be able to do the same to become electronic human-level minds, or beyond? Personally, I doubt even electronic human-equivalent minds would be capable of self-improvement. After all, we are not smart enough to build AIs better than us (yet), so why should electronic minds only as smart as we are be capable of that, either? A possible answer to that, I suppose, would be that the electronic mind would have far more input/training data fed to it per second than biological minds receive, and far more time to "work on" that sense data to derive patterns between each decision-step.
  - rdl 13y ago
    Because (naively) I'd assume it's some kind of software running on computers, and one can generally improve performance of that by buying more hardware or using better technology (or shorter lived components, or better cooling, or whatever). If humans created an AI to solve some kind of open-ended problem, where "more AI" made the solution better, there would be every incentive to spend the money on more or better hardware for it. It's not clear that a shark would gain much by being 100x smarter, particularly if the metabolic cost were high; for a lot of human problems, spending 100x more on hardware/power/etc. for a 10% better solution would be quite desirable.
  - henrygrew 13y ago
    What about the advantage gained by time, i think a major drawback to human improvement is the effect of death.Given enough time and accumulated experience, self improvement is possible.A machine cannot succumb to death.
- aragot 13y ago
  I personnaly don't think the brain could be as intelligent if it were only a part of it, like if had 3 senses instead of 5 for example: The emulation of a sense by the others might be necessary to bootstrap the system. So we might just be on the wrong path when we try to teach a small machine to learn. And maybe, once you have a fully functional brain, that it constantly derives out of bounds. Like sudden overheating, which is litterally the step #1 of a depression in a human. So we might not be able to scale an AI beyond the size of one brain. Apart from clusters obviously, but then you need to sustain civilizations of brains, and civs do collapse every dozen generations. We might not be materially able to find enough energy to power all of those trials and errors.
  - aliakbarkhan 13y ago
    The amount of rampant bulshitting here by obviously unqualified people is amazing. If you don't even know that humans do not, in fact, have five senses, I'm not sure I can take your post seriously even as unqualified speculation.
    - aragot 13y ago
      The whole thread including the OP is full of speculation by unqualified people, because AI is the ultimate fantasy for all of us here. So common sense is a perfectly satisfying qualification to post in this particular thread. Concerning the 5 senses, I refer to common wisdom because it speaks to everyone. Those who know better are probably smart enough to translate "5 senses" into an accurate scientific wording.
    - membrain 13y ago
      can we please put this right on top of the whole page and close this thread? too many ai-fanboys in here, who got their knowledge about ai from hollywood movies and video games..
chongli 13y ago
I think we need a better machine first. The current model of one or a handful of CPU cores with very tiny caches talking to memory over a narrow, high latency bus doesn't seem very efficient for building and querying massive (multi-petabyte), highly associative (thousands of associations) data structures.
- aragot 13y ago
  There are 100,000,000 neurons in the brain. It's not that many. A Core 2 Duo has 169m [1]. A neuron is connected to about 10.000 others. And how many computers do we have in the world? It even sounds like we scientifics are sluggish at inventing AI ;) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
  - tim333 13y ago
    Of course a Core 2 Duo has 169m transistors rather than neurons. Interestingly you can do a rough calculation of how much processing power would be needed to do the equivalent of a human brain and it's quite a lot. Hans Moravec calculates it a about 100 million million instructions a second ( http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm ) based on the processing power required to fuctionally equal the human retina which is reasonably understood. A core 2 duo does something more like 2.7 thousand million instructions per second and so you'd need about 35,000 of them for brain equivalence. So you're talking in 2014 terms of a a top end supercomputer rather than a macbook.
  - chongli 13y ago
    >There are 100,000,000 neurons in the brain. You're off by 3 orders of magnitude. Try 200 Billion[0]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain#Structure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain#Structure

Fair enough, but can we imagine a better algorithm?

by elwell 13y ago

Fair enough, but can we imagine a better algorithm?

rdl 13y ago

I've always assumed any real machine intelligence would be scalable to the point where even if it started at a millionth the functionality of a human, it would end up far surpassing humanity.

derefr 13y ago
Why do you believe this? We don't see animals self-improving to become humans (in the "consciously deciding what revisions to make to their mental architecture at each step" sense), so why would you expect electronic animal-level minds to be able to do the same to become electronic human-level minds, or beyond? Personally, I doubt even electronic human-equivalent minds would be capable of self-improvement. After all, we are not smart enough to build AIs better than us (yet), so why should electronic minds only as smart as we are be capable of that, either? A possible answer to that, I suppose, would be that the electronic mind would have far more input/training data fed to it per second than biological minds receive, and far more time to "work on" that sense data to derive patterns between each decision-step.
- rdl 13y ago
  Because (naively) I'd assume it's some kind of software running on computers, and one can generally improve performance of that by buying more hardware or using better technology (or shorter lived components, or better cooling, or whatever). If humans created an AI to solve some kind of open-ended problem, where "more AI" made the solution better, there would be every incentive to spend the money on more or better hardware for it. It's not clear that a shark would gain much by being 100x smarter, particularly if the metabolic cost were high; for a lot of human problems, spending 100x more on hardware/power/etc. for a 10% better solution would be quite desirable.
- henrygrew 13y ago
  What about the advantage gained by time, i think a major drawback to human improvement is the effect of death.Given enough time and accumulated experience, self improvement is possible.A machine cannot succumb to death.
aragot 13y ago
I personnaly don't think the brain could be as intelligent if it were only a part of it, like if had 3 senses instead of 5 for example: The emulation of a sense by the others might be necessary to bootstrap the system. So we might just be on the wrong path when we try to teach a small machine to learn. And maybe, once you have a fully functional brain, that it constantly derives out of bounds. Like sudden overheating, which is litterally the step #1 of a depression in a human. So we might not be able to scale an AI beyond the size of one brain. Apart from clusters obviously, but then you need to sustain civilizations of brains, and civs do collapse every dozen generations. We might not be materially able to find enough energy to power all of those trials and errors.
- aliakbarkhan 13y ago
  The amount of rampant bulshitting here by obviously unqualified people is amazing. If you don't even know that humans do not, in fact, have five senses, I'm not sure I can take your post seriously even as unqualified speculation.
  - aragot 13y ago
    The whole thread including the OP is full of speculation by unqualified people, because AI is the ultimate fantasy for all of us here. So common sense is a perfectly satisfying qualification to post in this particular thread. Concerning the 5 senses, I refer to common wisdom because it speaks to everyone. Those who know better are probably smart enough to translate "5 senses" into an accurate scientific wording.
  - membrain 13y ago
    can we please put this right on top of the whole page and close this thread? too many ai-fanboys in here, who got their knowledge about ai from hollywood movies and video games..

chongli 13y ago

I think we need a better machine first. The current model of one or a handful of CPU cores with very tiny caches talking to memory over a narrow, high latency bus doesn't seem very efficient for building and querying massive (multi-petabyte), highly associative (thousands of associations) data structures.

aragot 13y ago
There are 100,000,000 neurons in the brain. It's not that many. A Core 2 Duo has 169m [1]. A neuron is connected to about 10.000 others. And how many computers do we have in the world? It even sounds like we scientifics are sluggish at inventing AI ;) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
- tim333 13y ago
  Of course a Core 2 Duo has 169m transistors rather than neurons. Interestingly you can do a rough calculation of how much processing power would be needed to do the equivalent of a human brain and it's quite a lot. Hans Moravec calculates it a about 100 million million instructions a second ( http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm ) based on the processing power required to fuctionally equal the human retina which is reasonably understood. A core 2 duo does something more like 2.7 thousand million instructions per second and so you'd need about 35,000 of them for brain equivalence. So you're talking in 2014 terms of a a top end supercomputer rather than a macbook.
- chongli 13y ago
  >There are 100,000,000 neurons in the brain. You're off by 3 orders of magnitude. Try 200 Billion[0]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain#Structure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain#Structure