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1. Moore's Law is not an ironclad law, it's an observation about improvements in integrated circuit transistor density. Given that there are not that many node

by austinz 12y ago

1. Moore's Law is not an ironclad law, it's an observation about improvements in integrated circuit transistor density. Given that there are not that many node shrinks remaining before we hit the fundamental limits of our current technology, scientific discoveries will be necessary to continue increasing transistor density into the far future. It is absolutely not a given that Moore's Law has to continue until the Singularity can occur, although it isn't impossible that it'll be around for several more decades either. 2. The most powerful hardware in the world is useless without software. Improvements in AI theory don't follow Moore's law, and there is no reason they should. Maybe your super-fast computer can run machine learning algorithms on a huge dataset, but it's not clear machine learning alone is sufficient to produce something on the scale of the Singularity. Anyways, strong AI is a very difficult problem, but in no case I know of has the limiting factor ever been the power of the hardware (except maybe for neuronal simulations trying to emulate the activity of a human brain).

tim333 12y ago
1 - you don't need Moore's law, just the observation that computers have got steadily faster for decades and will probably continue. 2 >I know of has the limiting factor ever been the power of the hardware One example would be computer chess: "In 1990, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that a computer would win a game of chess against a human by 1998. His prediction came true on May 11, 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov." that prediction was done pretty much entirely on figuring the computational power needed and projecting when we'd get there. Not really rocket science, just some back of the envelope calculations. His 2029 prediction for the turing test is the same stuff.
- austinz 12y ago
  > will probably continue But will it, and why? This is little more than an article of faith. Computers are getting faster according to a given model, a model whose underlying technological process is reaching fundamental (scientific, not engineering) limits. We have no idea if whatever replaces that model will be anywhere as scalable as Moore's Law. > computer chess Computers play chess very differently from humans (they do what amounts to a brute force search of the state space and choose the best option). This is basically taking a well-known algorithm and figuring out how fast a computer needs to be in order to solve it in a tractable manner - cryptographers do the same thing when they decide that a cryptosystem can't be brute-force cracked in a reasonable amount of time. There is no well-defined algorithm for passing the Turing test, and given how so many of the 'interesting' problems in AI are outside the domain of highly logical, rules-based algorithms, using the same metric to measure them is not that useful.

by austinz 12y ago

tim333 12y ago

1 - you don't need Moore's law, just the observation that computers have got steadily faster for decades and will probably continue. 2 >I know of has the limiting factor ever been the power of the hardware One example would be computer chess: "In 1990, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that a computer would win a game of chess against a human by 1998. His prediction came true on May 11, 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov." that prediction was done pretty much entirely on figuring the computational power needed and projecting when we'd get there. Not really rocket science, just some back of the envelope calculations. His 2029 prediction for the turing test is the same stuff.

austinz 12y ago
> will probably continue But will it, and why? This is little more than an article of faith. Computers are getting faster according to a given model, a model whose underlying technological process is reaching fundamental (scientific, not engineering) limits. We have no idea if whatever replaces that model will be anywhere as scalable as Moore's Law. > computer chess Computers play chess very differently from humans (they do what amounts to a brute force search of the state space and choose the best option). This is basically taking a well-known algorithm and figuring out how fast a computer needs to be in order to solve it in a tractable manner - cryptographers do the same thing when they decide that a cryptosystem can't be brute-force cracked in a reasonable amount of time. There is no well-defined algorithm for passing the Turing test, and given how so many of the 'interesting' problems in AI are outside the domain of highly logical, rules-based algorithms, using the same metric to measure them is not that useful.