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Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

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Re: Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

#111

Post by gnaritas »

Retric wrote: post #107
gnaritas wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I don't find your point in the least bit compelling. Unless you're a leading expert in the field as he is, your points mean jack squat to me. And since I'm not making the argument, it's not argument from authority to say his book is far more convincing than your assertions without evidence. You're trying to debate me about a book I recommended; you're an ass. Goodbye.

That seems overly rude. It's also a ridiculous appeal to authority at the same time. If I where to attack the book I could say something like: "In chapter 2 'Chatterboxes' he states humans are the only animal that uses language which is complex issue by it's self. He goes further and says every group of humans in remote areas we encountered have had complex language. He then runs with that line of reasoning. However…

Are you mentally handicapped, what part of "Goodbye" was unclear to you? And no, it's not an argument from authority, I specifically headed off that critique when I said I wasn't making any fucking argument. Learn to read.

Re: Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

#112

Post by rdtsc »

Jun8 wrote: post #43

OK, let me start with two facts, one objective, one personal: (i) Noam Chomsky is a genius with many contributions to linguistics and computer science (ii) I think his overall influence had been damaging to linguistics. Here's a summary of Chomsky's career in layman's terms: As everyone knows, Chomsky first came to prominence with his critique of Skinner (who, as everyone also knows, was a total psycho). He pretty mu…

> Chomsky's greatly damaging influence to linguistics is due to the fact that his speculative and simplistic ... views on how the brain processes and learns language has stifled research in promising fields by decades.

By decades. Really? I think those claims would need better substantiation. Looking back we have a 20/20 hindsight and maybe can say where we took the wrong turn. But can you point out to other budding and promising theories that Chomsky somehow squashed because of, I don't know, his great power or character.

As for politics. Can you explain better and provide some more information. So far it seems, this is just you disagreeing with his politics and then attacking his influence on linguistics as an obvious extension of his political views.

> I think it's time to retire and the "old guard"!

No. You retire, theories that have been proven wrong and bring about theories that explain the reality in a better, more complete, or universal way. You don't retire the "old guard" because you disagree with their food tastes or politics (which seems to be in this case)

Re: Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

#113

Post by guscost »

Jun8 wrote: post #43

OK, let me start with two facts, one objective, one personal: (i) Noam Chomsky is a genius with many contributions to linguistics and computer science (ii) I think his overall influence had been damaging to linguistics. Here's a summary of Chomsky's career in layman's terms: As everyone knows, Chomsky first came to prominence with his critique of Skinner (who, as everyone also knows, was a total psycho). He pretty mu…

I think that his philosophy damaged linguistics (and science in general) rather than his theory or experiment. I think that he genuinely does not know where one should end and the other should begin, especially in his problem domain, especially in 2012.

Re: Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

#114

Post by Retric »

gnaritas wrote: post #111
Retric wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems overly rude. It's also a ridiculous appeal to authority at the same time. If I where to attack the book I could say something like: "In chapter 2 'Chatterboxes' he states humans are the only animal that uses language which is complex issue by it's self. He goes further and says every group of humans in remote areas we encountered have had complex language. He then runs with that line of reasoning. However…

Are you mentally handicapped, what part of "Goodbye" was unclear to you? And no, it's not an argument from authority, I specifically headed off that critique when I said I wasn't making any fucking argument. Learn to read.

Saying you found his argument convincing is in no way important either it's a factual statement it it's not, what you believe is meaningless. Suggesting it matters in any way who made the argument is an appeal to authority even if your next sentience says it's not. Reality does not care what you think it just is.

PS: You clearly lack the courage of your convictions to actually leave an argument when you say 'Goodbye'. However, I realize trying to reason with a fool is a waste of time, so best of luck and 'Goodbye'.

Re: Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

#115

Post by SudarshanP »

rm999 wrote: post #58
debacle wrote: post #2

They have two different definitions of "artificial intelligence," which is where the schism seems to be arising from. Chomsky takes the academic approach - artificial intelligence is the simulation of humanlike (or even possibly mammalian) intelligence. Norvig is taking the engineering approach - artificial intelligence needs only to pass the Turing test. They're both right, both approaches have value, and they both…

This is exactly my take on it. They are talking about AI in different contexts, and therefore aren't really arguing with each other as much as past each other. Anyone who has any interesting in building something today would take a Norvig approach, and anyone who pictures AI 100 years from now should hope that the Chomsky approach eventually won out.

Many confuse the Chomsky approach v/s Norvig approach as who is right and who is wrong. But that is an unnecessary distraction. Consider planes. The wright brothers studied planes without mastering Fluid dynamics. Their planes flew. That was awesome. But plane makers kept exploring and inventing. We achieved super sonic speeds and even made rockets. As time passed, we learnt more and more about fluid flows. While on the one hand atoms jiggling around with various velocities is all that we are studying. But the fluids demonstrate very rich and complex behaviours. Only a fool would stay contented that the aeroplane flew. Our understanding of fluid dynamics comes in handy to model wind turbines and weather patterns and a whole host of awesome areas. A lot of those great discoveries came from investments in aeronautical research made by profit hungry entrepreneurs. The science v/s technology debate is usually just funding politics. It is silly to argue whether the eye runs the marathon or the leg runs the marathon. Let us just accept that "the runner runs the marathon" and just move on.

Chomsky may or may not be right. Just like aristotle was not right about many things. He was a genius and he contributed as well. He may have stirred up some trouble also. Over time if we are fortunate enough we may get a clear understanding of the core ideas like we understand the behavior of a fluid. If we have to settle with flying planes but don't understand wind, we cannot go supersonic or reach the moon.

Re: Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

#116

Post by ddd571 »

Retric wrote: post #39
sp332 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It follows logically from these 3 premises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus#Summar... Those premises could be wrong but it's not just an axiom.

#2 is simply wrong. Children are corrected when their grammar is off so they do get to see incorrect sentence structure. It's questionable if children could learn language from only watching TV, but that's not the standard learning environment. PS: I am far from the first person to point that out. At this point they are treating it as an axiom because they continue to believe it despite the disproof of their premises…

Yet, they consistently ignore this input. This has also been pointed out dozens and dozens of times.

Re: Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

#117

Post by [deleted] »

Retric wrote: post #39
sp332 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It follows logically from these 3 premises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus#Summar... Those premises could be wrong but it's not just an axiom.

#2 is simply wrong. Children are corrected when their grammar is off so they do get to see incorrect sentence structure. It's questionable if children could learn language from only watching TV, but that's not the standard learning environment. PS: I am far from the first person to point that out. At this point they are treating it as an axiom because they continue to believe it despite the disproof of their premises…

[deleted]

Re: Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

#118

Post by ddd571 »

slurgfest wrote: post #74
_delirium wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I would take that strident battle-against-dinosaurs view, in part because I think intellectually understanding things is useful in and of itself, not some kind of "just build it and shut up" anti-intellectual view; and also because I don't think it's an accurate summary of the history of AI. There's no particular reason we can't both build and study things in various ways, and the history of AI has been…

Intellectually understanding things is useful. There's no anti-intellectualism here. It's become increasingly clear that Chomsky's approach to language is not going to generalize to AI successes or explanations of many domains of human performance, as was promised. That approach has not yielded fruitfully anywhere except the narrow realm of syntax (in particular typologies of syntax). While machine learning has kicke…

What about research showing things like intermediate traces exist, we parse sentences in accordance with binding principles, we don't postulate gaps for fillers in sentences in island contexts unless there'll later be a potential filler gap? All of these are facts we know from abstract work in Chomskyan syntax, and yet they've been replicated in laboratories. So, your claim that there's no fruits is just simply empirically false

Re: Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

#119

Post by mbq »

The main problem with Chomsky's approach is that it is quite likely that human intelligence mechanics are just incomprehensible for a human intelligence, and not because of some crazy construction tricks but simply plain old brute size and complexity it imposes. Judging from much simpler (thus deeper investigated) biological systems like some bacteria metabolisms we can see that there is no grand design there, only trivial primitive core and numerous layers of less or more subtle modifiers of modifiers. IMO there is no reason why the same can't work for the brain and thus the "transition to sentience" is way more continuous than we would like to expect.

Re: Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

#120

Post by chj »

Jun8 wrote: post #100
zzzeek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm completely ignorant here - is it widely established that there's no link between how we think about things versus the languages we speak ? It seems intuitive that our ability to conceive of concepts would be dependent on having/creating language that can describe them, even in our own minds, but I have no idea how anyone could really know one way or the other.

As you point out, this is a hard thing to test. Add to this the fact that the question may be a sensitive one, similar to differences between men and women. How can one go about testing the effect of language on thinking? Consider this example: English has an explicit grammatical structure for counterfactuals (CFs), e.g. "If I were a rich man ..." whereas some languages, e.g. Chinese (Mandarin) do not (they do have s…

This is bullshit. Chinese language does not rely on "were" to make CF structure, but that doesn't mean it can't make CF statements. if you replace "were" with "am", the sentence still means the same thing.
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