I'm still waiting for the day when a computer defeats a 9-dan professional Go player in an even game with the same time limits used in a normal professional games.
It's a matter of time.
Computers Beating Humans at Advanced Chess
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Computers Beating Humans at Advanced Chess
#22> 'what are humans still good for?' Enjoying playing chess.
Humans are still good at releasing chemicals that reward neural circuit and strengthen connections at a certain task. Process whose purpose is to slowly get better at that task. Wow, we really have an edge over a machine that is already better at the task and possibly getting better with every game without that particular reward mechanism you know as "enjoyment".
Re: Computers Beating Humans at Advanced Chess
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compiler, interpreter or an assembler is basically a translator. It doesn't have to think, it is simple computation following a set of rules, of course a computer would win in that case. But can a computer write code from scratch as good as a human? No(t yet).
Human minds are nothing more than computers running on unoptimized substrates. It's only a short matter of time on an evolutionary scale before machines surpass.
unoptimized? Hardly. Evolution has optimized our nerve systems for the task of heuristic information processing over tens or hundreds of million of iterations in parallel over billions of different implementations.
That part of your sentence is wrong, the rest (minds are nothing more than computers running on substrate) is wrong or meaningless, too. It just so happens that computation of the Turing model is one of the things human minds do, and badly. It's very much not the only thing. (Unless you mean computer in a sufficiently vague and abstract way as for the statement to be vacuous.)
Re: Computers Beating Humans at Advanced Chess
#24a bit off topic but i'm a bit surprised by all the comments on this thread dismissing human feelings and emotions as something reductible to their biochemicals components.
Games and many other human activities are social activities.Only analysing them the way you would analyse a stone falling on the ground is just silly. you're missing a big chunk of the reasons the phenomenon is taking place in the first place.
Re: Computers Beating Humans at Advanced Chess
#25> 'what are humans still good for?' Enjoying playing chess.
Humans are still good at releasing chemicals that reward neural circuit and strengthen connections at a certain task. Process whose purpose is to slowly get better at that task. Wow, we really have an edge over a machine that is already better at the task and possibly getting better with every game without that particular reward mechanism you know as "enjoyment".
Ha! Thanks for the chuckle. Yeah, I agree with you on the the fact that "enjoyment" can be seen as a tool evolved for improving our fitness function's scores.
The only problem I see with this line of thought is that if we keep following it, we get into the absurd. "Why even play chess?", "Why even bother doing anything a computer is better at doing?", "What to do then?". And, this is my personal answer: do things because you enjoy them.
I don't know if we will ever reach a point where a computer can decide if it wants to play chess, but I hope that if we do, then the computer chooses to play on the basis that it wants to play and not on the fact that it has to optimize some external parameter. (Although as I write this, I realize that "do things because you enjoy them" practically means maximizing your utility function.)
Ok, you win. Haha. I just stopped enjoying analyzing this issue. :)
Re: Computers Beating Humans at Advanced Chess
#26a bit off topic but i'm a bit surprised by all the comments on this thread dismissing human feelings and emotions as something reductible to their biochemicals components. Games and many other human activities are social activities.Only analysing them the way you would analyse a stone falling on the ground is just silly. you're missing a big chunk of the reasons the phenomenon is taking place in the first place.
The fact that this position is not even discussed but taken as an obviously true first premise by so many people in tech/engineering is rather troubling; I think it is the root cause of many very dysfunctional worldviews/failures to comprehend essential parts of life: over-application of economic thinking in all areas of discourse, libertarianism, stress upon efficiency at all costs in all cases, dismissal of the humanities, art, etc.
It is all driven from a simpler and more fundamental notion, that sometimes people who work on computers all day can begin to believe humans and computers are identical; a human that doesn't consistently optimize its actions with respect to certain metrics is just buggy/poorly executed software, hence, the poor deserve to be poor, action without potential utility gain/profit is wasted and valueless, etc.
Re: Computers Beating Humans at Advanced Chess
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human minds are nothing more than computers running on unoptimized substrates. It's only a short matter of time on an evolutionary scale before machines surpass.
unoptimized? Hardly. Evolution has optimized our nerve systems for the task of heuristic information processing over tens or hundreds of million of iterations in parallel over billions of different implementations. That part of your sentence is wrong, the rest (minds are nothing more than computers running on substrate) is wrong or meaningless, too. It just so happens that computation of the Turing model is one of th…
unoptimized? Hardly. Evolution has optimized our nerve systems for the task of heuristic information processing over tens or hundreds of million of iterations in parallel over billions of different implementations.
The biological method of information processing, calcium ion transfer, is demonstrably orders of magnitude slower than artificially devised methods by semiconductors. So this is physically not optimal and easily proved. So that part of my sentence is correct.
The rest of your comment is too ill-defined to refute, unless you hold that there is some non-material, extra-physical quantity of mental process that cannot be duplicated by engineering.
Re: Computers Beating Humans at Advanced Chess
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compiler, interpreter or an assembler is basically a translator. It doesn't have to think, it is simple computation following a set of rules, of course a computer would win in that case. But can a computer write code from scratch as good as a human? No(t yet).
Human minds are nothing more than computers running on unoptimized substrates. It's only a short matter of time on an evolutionary scale before machines surpass.
People have been making this claim since computers have existed, and it hasn't happened yet. It's similar to the way that fusion power is always 20 years away.
I think it will happen eventually, but given the long record of failed predictions in this area, I think that a blanket statement that it's going to be a "short matter of time" is unwarranted.
Re: Computers Beating Humans at Advanced Chess
#29> 'what are humans still good for?' To take this from chess is rather silly. Chess is a discrete game on 64 squares with a handful of possibilities in a given position, and a result of three different outcomes. It's right next to long division in the spectrum of problems that are amenable to computer analysis. If anything, the surprise isn't that humans have been surpassed by computers in calculating chess positions,…
> Further the techniques to improve computer chess programs are brilliant, but they aren't techniques that lend themselves to domains of intelligence beyond chess.
I beg to differ. MiniMax for instance is a technique that has wide application outside of chess, as do alpha/beta pruning and other optimization strategies.
Chess as a game has advanced computer science considerably. Did you know that the first computer program was a chess program? It was played by having rooms full of people work through the code in order to compute the next move.
Re: Computers Beating Humans at Advanced Chess
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
unoptimized? Hardly. Evolution has optimized our nerve systems for the task of heuristic information processing over tens or hundreds of million of iterations in parallel over billions of different implementations. That part of your sentence is wrong, the rest (minds are nothing more than computers running on substrate) is wrong or meaningless, too. It just so happens that computation of the Turing model is one of th…
unoptimized? Hardly. Evolution has optimized our nerve systems for the task of heuristic information processing over tens or hundreds of million of iterations in parallel over billions of different implementations. The biological method of information processing, calcium ion transfer, is demonstrably orders of magnitude slower than artificially devised methods by semiconductors. So this is physically not optimal and…
Having slower individual components running at ridiculously low power is a valid optimization because it allows very close packing of those components and levels of interconnection that we can only dream of in our designed systems.
The optimization is a subtle one but extremely powerful, and it will be a while before we can pack equivalent computational power in something of similar size and power requirements.
Think about the amount of hardware required to simulate a cat brain at reduced speed, then think about the amount of hardware in a cat brain.