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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

#121

Post by gnaritas »

Retric wrote: post #114
gnaritas wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

PS: Fuck you, I wasn't even talking to you, I recommended a book to someone. You lack the brains to know when someone isn't interested a debate, because you're an ass.

PS: You're still an ass, and you don't know what appeal to authority means. We have to be debating and me relying on him to make a point for it to be an appeal to authority. As I clearly indicated I wasn't interested in debating the subject, you can't accuse me of logical fallacies, a point I made previously but you failed to grok because you're an ass.

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

#122

Post by ilaksh »

I know that everyone has been careful not to mention Chomsky's political beliefs, but I am suspicious that this is actually partly about Chomsky's political beliefs, which I think are more in line with reality or at least more egalitarian than Norvig's must be, since Norvig has been running one of the hegemony's greatest tools recently. I see a parallel between the general derisive dismissal of Chomsky's academic views as being simplistic with the type of dismissal commonly given to a Chomskyish geopolitical viewpoint. I see this disagreement as a surrogate for the very different geopolitical worldviews.

I doubt that Chomsky is really so hard line about his old approaches to AI as we are led to believe, although he is probably farther behind the times than Norving.

I actually think that even Norvig is just applying recent contemporary AI to AI problems, but still is part of an old or establishment guard himself as far as AI goes. I think that the real cutting edge AI research is called AGI (artificial general intelligence) research.

The generation/category of AI research or machine learning that Norvig is tied into is much newer and steps beyond the earlier traditional AI that Chomsky might have been involved with, but the AGI researchers are a step beyond Norvig's clique. And the AGI researchers are, by the way, very optimistic about the Singularity or at least the likelihood of human-like and probably super-human artificial general intelligence in the short or medium term.

I mean the Norvigish machine-learning stuff isn't completely disconnected from the AGI stuff and completely behind and I assume it will result in extremely capable AIs relatively soon, but the AGI approaches will probably prove to be more powerful and more humanlike since they are closer to human models.

Take a look at what Brain Corporation is doing, or Numenta, or the OpenCog project. That stuff is beyond Norvig and friends' approaches.

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

#123

Post by neilk »

knowtheory wrote: post #51
phaedrus wrote: post #40

I spent about ten years working on Markov based chat programs. I gave up on themwhen I realized that no matter how sophisticated your statistical model it will never be more than a statistical analysis of text, unless it includes some rich rule based model of mental processes and mental objects. It may be that such a model of mental processes must itself be fuzzy and probabilistic, but it must exist. Therefore I come…

Just because you chose Markov chains as your modeling mechanism doesn't mean that there is no statistical modeling method that is capable of developing something passing for what we'd call "meaning". This is the same argument that was used against artificial neural networks. Neural network of type A can't do X, therefore neural networks will never do Y. Language is immensely complex, and real human language involves…

I am not a specialist, but as far as I know, Chomsky's argument here was that the existence of recursion showed that a Markov approach had to be wrong. Surely a similar argument can be made for statistical approaches? There is no way to represent a reference to some other part of the statement in a purely statistical method. If they work they happen to work basically by accident.

Just blue-skying here, but it seems to me that if I knew enough about how a statistical program worked, I could craft a sentence that would utterly confuse it, even though it was perfectly intelligible to a normal English speaker. A putative strong-AI program could not be fooled in this way.

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

#124

Post by knowtheory »

neilk wrote: post #123
knowtheory wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you chose Markov chains as your modeling mechanism doesn't mean that there is no statistical modeling method that is capable of developing something passing for what we'd call "meaning". This is the same argument that was used against artificial neural networks. Neural network of type A can't do X, therefore neural networks will never do Y. Language is immensely complex, and real human language involves…

I am not a specialist, but as far as I know, Chomsky's argument here was that the existence of recursion showed that a Markov approach had to be wrong. Surely a similar argument can be made for statistical approaches? There is no way to represent a reference to some other part of the statement in a purely statistical method. If they work they happen to work basically by accident. Just blue-skying here, but it seems t…

Except that his argument is somewhat moot as a practical matter, because there are no infinitely recursive sentences (given that all sentences are finite).

Long distance dependencies are an issue in language modeling that do need to be accounted for, but all that tells me is that Markov chains aren't the right structure to model language (unless, maybe you had a MASSIVE amount of data, and a markov chain of an order high enough that you account for the majority of sentences. maybe).

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

#125

Post by [deleted] »

sp332 wrote: post #9
phuff wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having studied Chomsky a fair bit in grad school, and also studied cognitive linguistics a fair bit in grad school, I think the idea that Chomsky's models will ever win anything is just wrong. Chomsky's central problem is that his modeling is not based on anything biological at all. His models don't correspond to reality. Some of them were based on some assumptions about how the brain works that were untestable in th…

Children learn language much faster than it seems possible for a "blank" neural network to learn. It seems that there is some "circuitry" hard-wired into the human brain that helps learning language. So the question is: can a computer learn language as well as a human, without simply hard-coding language into it?

[deleted]

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

#126

Post by saurik »

mcguire wrote: post #99
knowtheory wrote: post #27

It's a little bit frustrating to read a rehash of an argument that was cutting edge maybe back in the late 90s, especially one that is so poorly written, and framed as a battle between two intellectuals. Chomsky's past his heyday. He has been seminal in his field, but he's no longer doing research which pushes at the boundaries of our understanding of language, how to model it, or what the fundamental nature of langu…

Non-Chomskian linguists? I was under the impression that, post-Chomsky, linguistics was defined as Chomskian; everyone else had left the field for whatever related discipline most closely matched what they wanted to do.

West Coast Functionalism gave birth to various continuations that are still practiced fervently at various universities (including UCSB, as a specific example I can point to that I have personal experience with).

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

#127

Post by jholman »

mcguire wrote: post #99
knowtheory wrote: post #27

It's a little bit frustrating to read a rehash of an argument that was cutting edge maybe back in the late 90s, especially one that is so poorly written, and framed as a battle between two intellectuals. Chomsky's past his heyday. He has been seminal in his field, but he's no longer doing research which pushes at the boundaries of our understanding of language, how to model it, or what the fundamental nature of langu…

Non-Chomskian linguists? I was under the impression that, post-Chomsky, linguistics was defined as Chomskian; everyone else had left the field for whatever related discipline most closely matched what they wanted to do.

Elaborating on what knowtheory posted, in modern linguistics, "Chomskian" doesn't usually refer to "everything Chomsky said". For example, Chomsky was probably the foremost advocate of the overthrow of behaviourist theory in linguistics, and now no-one takes extreme behaviourism a la BF Skinner serious (as an explanation of linguistic behaviour), but this rejection is not currently labelled as "Chomskian". It's just linguistics.

So, not that I'm 100% clear on the details, but Chomskian refers to more specific claims. For example, some claims about what aspects of language knowledge are innate (Chomsky claims a great language engine with a relatively small number of tuning parameters). As another example, at least at one point, I think Chomsky was rejecting syntax rulesets with productions that were not binary? I think?

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

#128

Post by orbitingpluto »

bluekeybox wrote: post #22
orbitingpluto wrote: post #17

I know a card counter. I showed him how to condition probabilities to determine how to best play. He went for the full Monte Carlo method and he lets his simulation run for a week before he starts using it "just to make sure". It's frustrating because he doesn't get that his results are statistically significant after about 30 seconds of runtime. He still makes money doing it. The results are tangible, but he's still…

> You're not really a scientist if you create something that works and you don't really know why. According to your logic, the only true "science" is mathematics. If you test the workings of your "creation" using scientific method, you're still a scientist. Scientific method is also about testing your claims empirically, and it has been successfully applied for more than a century to study of biological organisms, cl…

I notch you up a point good sir for discovering my bias. (mathematics)

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

#129

Post by bluekeybox »

debacle wrote: post #16
mootothemax wrote: post #8

Isn't this basically an argument over John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment? It supposes that there is a program that gives a computer the ability to carry on an intelligent conversation in written Chinese. If the program is given to someone who speaks only English to execute the instructions of the program by hand, then in theory, the English speaker would also be able to carry on a conversation in written C…

The problem with Searle's assertion is that he is making a distinction between the computer and the program. We, as human beings, are not our computers, we are our programs.

Absolutely. Also, according to Searle's argument, submarines cannot swim.

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

#130

Post by bluekeybox »

orbitingpluto wrote: post #128
bluekeybox wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're not really a scientist if you create something that works and you don't really know why. According to your logic, the only true "science" is mathematics. If you test the workings of your "creation" using scientific method, you're still a scientist. Scientific method is also about testing your claims empirically, and it has been successfully applied for more than a century to study of biological organisms, cl…

I notch you up a point good sir for discovering my bias. (mathematics)

I guess I know your bias because I'm biased towards mathematics as well :).
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