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Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

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Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#51

Post by nitwit005 »

> Now let's take another activity that humans should be good at: game-playing.

It should be just the opposite. There was no evolutionary pressure on humans to make them play Chess well. The games are interesting to us partly because they're challenging and make us think differently.

If you want a fair comparison, you need to look at how successful we've been at making machines to do things animals were facing evolutionary pressure to do successfully.

Imagine trying to build an ant. A machine with a tiny, power efficient brain, that coordinates with its fellows to gather resources and build enormous hives. Could we make computers do that? Maybe eventually, but we're nowhere close today. Just making a machine walk with grace is at the edge of what we can do.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#52

Post by beat »

progressive_dad wrote: post #27
arethuza wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doug Lenat's Automated Mathematician (AM) apparently did "discover" multiplication by itself: http://web.onetel.net.uk/~hibou/ai-course/lenat.txt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Mathematician Of course, you could argue that multiplication was implicitly there in the rules and facts it was programmed with.

Let me know when humans invent something not governed by the rules the universe was programmed with ;-)

Poetry.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#53

Post by DonaldFisk »

yequalsx wrote: post #36
DonaldFisk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inventing multiplication is something no computer (as we currently understand them) would ever be able to do. AM, the discovery learning program developed by Doug Lenat, discovered multiplication, beginning with a few basic facts about set theory, and using about 200 heuristics.

I don't consider this an example of discovering multiplication. The set theory rules were given to the computer. Can a computer be built to start only with sensory input and then discover the rules of set theory? Would it ever be able recognize why the patterns and rules for operating with sets are important and worth further study? I'm skeptical. Would a program flag the discovery of multiplication as important beca…

Eurisko, AM's successor, did that: AM and Eurisko used a measure of interestingness to direct their searches. Here is one of Eurisko's inventions:

From EURISKO: A program that learns new heuristics and domain concepts: "Almost immediately, symmetry heuristics produced a very powerful yet simple device, one which simultaneously computes NAND and OR, using only two small metal regions, two n-doped regions, two p-doped regions, and one intrinsic channel region."

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#54

Post by soared »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #38
jcoffland wrote: post #19

> It would be very easy to invent games that were so complicated that only computers could play them; computers could even invent such games automatically. Of the many errors in this article this is one of the most flagrant. Computers have yet to invent any novel and challenging games. That would take ingenuity, something computers have failed to demonstrate. However, I suspect the author is trolling a bit.

Every time you play a video game that uses generated levels, you are playing a game "invented" by a computer.

"Invented" by algorithms written by humans. It would maybe be invented if a neural net created maps.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#55

Post by adamsea »

arethuza wrote: post #12
beat wrote: post #6

Multiplying 3842 by 543 is very hard for humans. They're slow and inaccurate. Computers do it perfectly at incredible speeds. Inventing multiplication is something no computer (as we currently understand them) would ever be able to do. For another analogy, moving ten tons of rock a thousand feet is something humans can do, and have done for millennia. It's very slow and difficult. A bulldozer can do the same thing in…

Doug Lenat's Automated Mathematician (AM) apparently did "discover" multiplication by itself: http://web.onetel.net.uk/~hibou/ai-course/lenat.txt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Mathematician Of course, you could argue that multiplication was implicitly there in the rules and facts it was programmed with.

Write me program that could write Doug Lenat's Automated Mathematician. ;)

I think the OP's point was until humans invent true strong AI there is a qualitative difference between human and computer intelligence.

And even if/when a true "thinking machine" is invented, the intelligence which was able to create said machine would be nothing to sneeze at!

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#56

Post by yequalsx »

maaku wrote: post #40
yequalsx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't consider this an example of discovering multiplication. The set theory rules were given to the computer. Can a computer be built to start only with sensory input and then discover the rules of set theory? Would it ever be able recognize why the patterns and rules for operating with sets are important and worth further study? I'm skeptical. Would a program flag the discovery of multiplication as important beca…

Absolutely. Look at Pat Langley's BACON program back in the 80's. He didn't work on multiplication per se, but given nothing but "sensory input" it discovered laws of planetary motion, rules of physical chemistry, conservation laws, etc.

I looked at a summary of his work. I've never heard of him or of the BACON program so my knowledge is essentially zero in this. Looking at summary of his work it doesn't seem to me to qualify either.

I'm not sure how to convey the idea in my head to English in such a way to make it clear why I think BACON doesn't qualify as discovering new ideas. I'll try though.

From the write up, by Langely, of the program he wrote the program to detect regularity in data and if it found such regularity it would "leap out" to the program so that "it could take appropriate" action. As I understand the program it picks up on any sort of regularity. The program doesn't understand which forms of regularity are important and which are not. The programming system and data it looks at are geared to finding regularity that are meaningful. If the data inputs are vastly widened then it seems to me it would find regularity that wouldn't be considered meaningful. I can imagine the program fixating on a regularity pattern that is meaningless. I hope what I'm writing makes sense.

The work he did is interesting and I wonder what advances have been made since then.

Let me ask this question. Would a program that looks for regularity discover that in finite probability spaces probability zero events never occur? I think this is something a computer could discover. Could it end up concluding that probability zero events can occur if one looks at uncountable probability measure spaces? It seems to mean that programs will never be able to think or discover things at a meta level. Would a program be able to discover Godel's incompleteness theorem? Of course I don't know the answer. I just suspect that the answer is no. However, humans took thousands of years to discover these things. So perhaps an AI that ran for that long could as well.

Thank you for pointing me to the BACON program. I'd never heard of it before.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#57

Post by varjag »

arethuza wrote: post #12
beat wrote: post #6

Multiplying 3842 by 543 is very hard for humans. They're slow and inaccurate. Computers do it perfectly at incredible speeds. Inventing multiplication is something no computer (as we currently understand them) would ever be able to do. For another analogy, moving ten tons of rock a thousand feet is something humans can do, and have done for millennia. It's very slow and difficult. A bulldozer can do the same thing in…

Doug Lenat's Automated Mathematician (AM) apparently did "discover" multiplication by itself: http://web.onetel.net.uk/~hibou/ai-course/lenat.txt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Mathematician Of course, you could argue that multiplication was implicitly there in the rules and facts it was programmed with.

That's what Lenat himself argues in his follow-up paper. But I generally agree, there's nothing preventing computers "as we know it" to exhibit human level general intelligence. Humans weren't just smart enough so far to program it yet.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#58

Post by ArkyBeagle »

gonehome wrote: post #50
beat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human intelligence is not magic, but it is categorically different from machine intelligence. What's amazing isn't that Deep Blue could beat Kasparov, given the depth of analysis it could do. What's amazing is that Kasparov could beat Deep Blue, despite not being able to analyze thousands of possible moves a second in his head.

I think Alpha Go is more in the category of human intelligence. My probably oversimplified understanding is that the neural network training on a massive amount of games develops something like intuition. It can't explain why a certain move it makes is the best, but only that it is the most likely to win. This seems similar to advanced human play.

One heuristic is that anything that is AI that actually works gets reclassified as something else.

Are Kalman filters machine intelligence? It sort of doesn't matter, really.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#60

Post by rtkwe »

tlb wrote: post #21
rtkwe wrote: post #18

> But the argument goes both ways here as well: take an arbitrary human (such as yourself, if you happen to be human) and try placing this human in the cockpit of a landing jet plane, in a semiconductor factory, in the oval office of the White House, in the kitchen of a gourmet restaurant, on a horseback in Siberia, or equipped with only a spear in the middle of the Amazonas jungle. There are humans that have been pr…

That's partly because nobody has tried very hard to write one piece of software that's good at landing planes and being the president. Why not just write two pieces of software? What business model would a combined piece of software enable? Specialization of software is mostly a virtue.

I'm not arguing that writing 2 different software isn't a solution or against software specialization. I'm saying (in part) that comparing a domain specific program(s) to a generalist human and calling the strictly domain specific 'intelligence' better misses some very critical points in capability. Even a combined program that's able to fly a plane and run a factory (changed from being president because doing that job well would probably require a full strong AI which could do any other task) is still just as constrained except now to just 2 fields instead of 1.

To me it's not about the exact number of tasks that a particular bit of software can perform but that to call it's intelligence better than human it has to be able to increase it's own capability over time in novel tasks and environments. I'm also extremely resistant to equating simple calculating and data look up speed with intelligence as the author does with the multiplication and random SSN look up examples.

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