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Exponential improvements aren't very helpful if you're working on exponentially hard problems. Exponential growth of technology hasn't solved machine intellige
by shoyer 12y ago
Exponential improvements aren't very helpful if you're working on exponentially hard problems.
Exponential growth of technology hasn't solved machine intelligence (by direct simulation) for essentially the same reason why it hasn't solved numerical weather prediction or made quantum computers pointless.
To expand on weather prediction: you need an order of magnitude improvement in computer speed to make weather forecasts with the same quality one day earlier. So exponential growth of computing power means linear growth in terms of subjective benefit.
To be fair, we don't understand the difficulty of modeling intelligence anywhere near as well as we understand the difficulty of modeling the weather. But, given the limits of our current abilities to simulate the brain, it seems reasonable to guess that similar principles could hold.
- marcosdumay 12y agoWhat's exponentially hard about it? Talking like a human is a bounded problem, it has no margin for growing (or shrinking). Any kind of growth in capacity will help against it.
- ForHackernews 12y agoFair enough, but that's like saying "intergalactic travel is a bounded problem"
- marcosdumay 12y agoWell, it is. You can't claim it grows in any specific way, because it does not grow (at least at the Local Group). You can not claim that exponential growth on space travel tech isn't enough to get intergalactic travel. Any non-declining rate of progress will get us there eventually. (Whatever "exponential growth" means on this context, for computation it's very well defined. Also, whatever realist is on non-declining rate of progress, the rate for computation is clearly increasing.)
- SilasX 12y ago>Exponential improvements aren't very helpful if you're working on exponentially hard problems. Sure they are! They reduce it to a problem that's only polynomially hard! :-p >Exponential growth of technology hasn't solved machine intelligence (by direct simulation) for essentially the same reason why it hasn't solved numerical weather prediction or made quantum computers pointless. Okay, but that's a rather high bar to judge it against. Humanity has solved many lesser machine intelligence problems, like web search, voice recognition, routing, and recommendation. Though I agree the relevant exponential growth was in the power of the algorithms, not so much the hardware.
- tmerr 12y agoI don't see why "weather forecasting" is similar to "brain simulation" in difficulty. The comparison would be more valid if the problem were "brain forecasting", that is to build an AI that would behave exactly the same as a particular human, but that's an even harsher measure of intelligence than the turing test that I doubt anyone would take seriously. I'm not saying the brain's easy to simulate, it's just the analogy here seems shaky. Where is the source of exponential difficulty?