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Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

insidescience.org

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Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#121

Post by melipone »

espeed wrote: post #64

"Trying to capture as many future histories as possible" (keeping your options open) harmonizes well with Paul Graham's view on procrastination ( http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html ) and the tenet of "put off decisions as long as possible". UPDATE: Evidently several smart people have had this intuition. I just remembered who said, "Never make a decision until you have to" -- it was Randy Pausch in the "The La…

Yes, there is also something similar in game theory. You're losing if your adversary reduces your branching factor.

Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#122

Post by alexvr »

lurker14 wrote: post #62
alexvr wrote: post #16

This could be big .

It would be interesting if someone other than the author submitter had that opinion. Nice astroturf attempt, though, alexwg/alexvr.

Note to self: don't post an enthusiastic comment on someone's thread if they have a similar name. I was really puzzled as to why I got so many downvotes on that comment.

You're wrong, though. I'm not the "author submitter." Believe it or not, Alex is a common name.

And what is an "astroturf attempt"?

Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#123

Post by marcosdumay »

gbog wrote: post #101

The top comment currently says "This sounds like nonsense to me", its first child agrees and add something like "everybody new it since ages". Well, for one I like this article. I wonder if we developers could use entropy instead of debt to explain the necessity of refactorings and abstractions. When you say that there is a lot of technical debt, the boss would assume that it is like financial debt: as long as you ar…

Going off topic...

The "technical debt" term was created to explain the situation in a way that your boss (that knows a bit about money) could understand and make usefull analogies. Framing it in terms of entropy, altough more precise won't achieve any of those goals.

Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#124

Post by leot »

I came here hoping to find intelligent commentary on the article. Instead, it's mostly uninformed criticism.

The most promoted comments are basically "I didn't carefully read or try hard to understand this paper, but everything I think I know up to now says that it can't be very interesting."

I don't really understand the paper either. But given that it was reviewed and published in a good journal, and given that it's by a guy who's evidently quite smart, and given that it seems carefully written, it surely deserves better than cursory dismissal.

If you want to go off half-cocked, try Reddit.

Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#125

Post by cscurmudgeon »

leot wrote: post #124

I came here hoping to find intelligent commentary on the article. Instead, it's mostly uninformed criticism. The most promoted comments are basically "I didn't carefully read or try hard to understand this paper, but everything I think I know up to now says that it can't be very interesting." I don't really understand the paper either. But given that it was reviewed and published in a good journal, and given that it'…

Science requires constant criticism especially when people claim grand things. Don't assume people here are idiots and have not read the paper.

Every year there are dozens of papers claiming a grand theory of AI.

Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#126

Post by thibauts »

dusklight wrote: post #112
tinco wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that these models could be extended to really big complex problems with the same basic principle. Therefore, it seems that intelligence of arbitrary complexity can be achieved with these algorithms. I don't think that claim is very bold at all, it is merely an observation. The idea that the algorithm tries to maintain entropy is very much like life as we know it. Life as we know it are mechanisms that des…

It's pretty clear that we are not the only animals with brains, so there are other animals who use their brains to make decisions, such as how to hunt and when to sleep and so on. We make what is in our opinion more sophisticated decisions, but that arguably is a human-centric conceit. There are ant colonies that span continents, and they aren't building any nuclear weapons. Are we really sure we are more intelligent…

What I feel makes us different from animals is not being able to adapt, as you pointed out (many animals exhibit learned behavior and conscious decision making), it's not even being self-conscious (it's been proven animals can be too), it's in my opinion the ability to observe and act on your own thought-streams.

And this is deeply linked to language, as language is a way to receive informations you don't already have and coerce your thoughts streams (or not) along them to make predictions that are not based on experience. In my opionion it is very important to make this distinction between predictions learned by experience and predictions learned by the books. I think we here can measure this difference very well.

To me it looks like this added layer of brain cells we have acts as an observer on life happening on the floor below, kind of a god of your own brain, acting not on experience-learned behaviour but solely on a combination of representation learned from others (connections created willfully from other's discourse) and abstractions made from adaptive learning done on signals coming from the layers below (I envision an isolated system whose only object of observation is regular thoughts and whose only sense is signals coming through connections to layers producing those thoughts).

It feel likes what makes us apart is first this simple fact we learn from our own though patterns. This enables us to make what (at least) feels like free decisions based on abstracted representation and not mere immediate experience. This enables us to think outside the box of our own experiences and form models of other's. This enables us to delibarately picture in our minds things that we have never experienced, or things that cannot be experienced (think abstract models in sciences). This finally enables us to accept information from our peers as valid signals to model our though-paths on. If this layer was anything real, to me it would mainly be an experience or information-sharing device. This thing that makes possible, and makes useful, the kind of social structure we know and live in.

I may be rehashing common knowledge, I don't know.

Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#127

Post by solistice »

ac500 wrote: post #117
calhoun137 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a rational agent, a decision is good or bad based on it's preferences, which are described mathematically as part of the definition of the rational agent. So I don't believe it's tautological. I do agree with your statement that intelligence is difficult to describe. And for the record I never claimed the rational agent approach will achieve "true machine intelligence". Frankly, I don't even know what "true" mach…

I also don't think you have to disprove Godel's theorem to create an AI that thinks outside the box, however, I believe you would have to for it to be a rational agent. A rational agent by definition operates strictly within the domain of a formal system. Thus by definition, a rational agent is in direct conflict with the notion of "thinking outside the box." Of course any simulation is implemented in some formal sys…

Wait, wasn't a rational agent simply an agent that optimized a certain result given a set of knowledge about it and it's environment? I mean in engineering and physics, you do try to build the perfect something, but you also realize you will never ever build the perfect something. You'll never build the perfect computer, the perfect op amp, nor the perfect rational agent, just as you'll never find the biggest number, because there's no upper bounds on these kind of things.

Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#128

Post by solistice »

pjscott wrote: post #82
wamatt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's turtles all the way down, until you reach Philosophy

... At which point it's still turtles, but nobody can really agree on what a turtle is, or what it means for something to be turtles, or what it means for something to be anything, including (but not limited to) turtles, or what it means for something to mean something. By the time the subject is settled -- if it ever is settled -- the turtle is dead. And so is God. (For some definitions of "turtle", "dead", "God", a…

Wasn't arguing about the definition of "is" a topic when the Linguists got bored and tried to invade the Philosophy Departments?

Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#129

Post by solistice »

phillmv wrote: post #52
alexwg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes: http://alexwg.org/

Whelp, that's completely unreadable to me. Undergraduate computer science fail. I got as far as "the model of this physical process of entropy can act as a search function for lower entropic states, which given some poking, can resemble problem solution states". It's the poking part that is problematic. >To better understand this classical-thermal form (11) of causal entropic forcingwe simulated its effect [12,13] on…

phill, this is hacker news, and if someone finds you're wildly unqualified to comment on something, don't worry, he'll be vocal about it and explain exactly why he thinks you're unqualified to comment about it. That's why I love this site. On any similar site aggregator, I'd get cat pictures and people telling me my opinions are stupid because my face is stupid.

More towards the topic, I'd say these kind of articles have to be taken with a grain of something, preferably salt or cynism, depending on taste. I'm usually more of a material science/electronics technology buff, and news articles in that area will not hestitate to present a relatively minor paper as a breakthrough in battery technology that will solve all our energy problems in the next 5 years. But then you read on, compare it against the existing technologies and you realize that they just did something funny to the diodes that increases power density at the cost of usuage time. Somewhat handy in some applications, but not a game changer.

PS: You're certainly not the youngest here.

Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#130

Post by ac500 »

solistice wrote: post #127
ac500 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't think you have to disprove Godel's theorem to create an AI that thinks outside the box, however, I believe you would have to for it to be a rational agent. A rational agent by definition operates strictly within the domain of a formal system. Thus by definition, a rational agent is in direct conflict with the notion of "thinking outside the box." Of course any simulation is implemented in some formal sys…

Wait, wasn't a rational agent simply an agent that optimized a certain result given a set of knowledge about it and it's environment? I mean in engineering and physics, you do try to build the perfect something, but you also realize you will never ever build the perfect something. You'll never build the perfect computer, the perfect op amp, nor the perfect rational agent, just as you'll never find the biggest number,…

Try to implement a rational agent (the AI or mathematically formalized variety) in software, and you'll see what I mean. You have to define some utility function precisely, and some algorithm to maximize it.

The problem with this is it won't really produce a "general intelligence" that can think outside the box, because it will always be maximizing some utility function defined in some rigid formal system. In other words, it will be completely unable to "understand" things outside of the formal system in which you define it.

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