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The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain

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Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain

#11

Post by iamflimflam1 »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #2

It's strange today to remember that playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI, but today we consider it much less so. I thought Turing's Test would be a good barometer of AI, but in today's World of mountains of AI slop fooling more and more people, and ironically there being software that is better at solving CAPTCHAs than humans, I'm not so sure. Add into the mix that there are reports of people developin…

> It's strange today to remember that playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI, but today we consider it much less so.

It was seen as so difficult to do that research should be abandoned.

Projects in category B were held to be failures. One important project, that of "programming and building a robot that would mimic human ability in a combination of eye-hand co-ordination and common-sense problem solving", was considered entirely disappointing. Similarly, chess playing programs were no better than human amateurs. Due to the combinatorial explosion, the run-time of general algorithms quickly grew impractical, requiring detailed problem-specific heuristics.

The report stated that it was expected that within the next 25 years, category A would simply become applied technologies engineering, C would integrate with psychology and neurobiology, while category B would be abandoned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthill_report

Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain

#12

Post by jltsiren »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #2

It's strange today to remember that playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI, but today we consider it much less so. I thought Turing's Test would be a good barometer of AI, but in today's World of mountains of AI slop fooling more and more people, and ironically there being software that is better at solving CAPTCHAs than humans, I'm not so sure. Add into the mix that there are reports of people developin…

Tests can only show that something is not AGI. If you want to show that a system is AGI, you must wait for expert consensus. That means adding new tests and dropping old ones, as our understanding of intelligence improves. If something is truly AGI, people will eventually run out of plausible objections.

Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain

#13

Post by nemomarx »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #2

It's strange today to remember that playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI, but today we consider it much less so. I thought Turing's Test would be a good barometer of AI, but in today's World of mountains of AI slop fooling more and more people, and ironically there being software that is better at solving CAPTCHAs than humans, I'm not so sure. Add into the mix that there are reports of people developin…

I suppose doing useful research becomes the next target?

that's what the exponential lift off people want right

Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain

#14

Post by Scarblac »

zmgsabst wrote: post #9
Scarblac wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can only be decided in hindsight. By the time everybody agrees that the system is clearly generally intelligent, it will have been for ages already. It will already be far more intelligent than even very smart humans. But I think general problem solving is a part of it. Coming up with its own ideas for possible solutions rather than what it generalized from a training set, and being able to try them out and iter…

Are you saying most humans aren’t generally intelligent, by your definition?

Humans are very different from computers. In particular there are some things that computers are vastly better at (computation, memory, etc), and humans are optimized for surviving in their biological environment, not necessarily for general intelligence.

I think asking of an AGI to do what humans do is asking a submarine to swim. It's not very useful.

So I think that when we have useful computer AGI, it will be much better at it than humans.

You already see that even with say ChatGPT -- it's not expert level, but the knowledge it does have is way way wider than any human's. If we get something that's as smart as humans, it will probably still be as widely applicable.

And why even try, otherwise? We already have human intelligence.

Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain

#15

Post by rjsw »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #11
PaulRobinson wrote: post #2

It's strange today to remember that playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI, but today we consider it much less so. I thought Turing's Test would be a good barometer of AI, but in today's World of mountains of AI slop fooling more and more people, and ironically there being software that is better at solving CAPTCHAs than humans, I'm not so sure. Add into the mix that there are reports of people developin…

> It's strange today to remember that playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI, but today we consider it much less so. It was seen as so difficult to do that research should be abandoned. Projects in category B were held to be failures. One important project, that of "programming and building a robot that would mimic human ability in a combination of eye-hand co-ordination and common-sense problem solving"…

The linked post points out that it is a low-cost area of research and you don't need to explain the context to a reviewer.

Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain

#16

Post by officehero »

pyman wrote: post #8
PaulRobinson wrote: post #2

It's strange today to remember that playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI, but today we consider it much less so. I thought Turing's Test would be a good barometer of AI, but in today's World of mountains of AI slop fooling more and more people, and ironically there being software that is better at solving CAPTCHAs than humans, I'm not so sure. Add into the mix that there are reports of people developin…

I have a similar philosophical question: My dog doesn't know what I do for a living, and he has no concept of how intelligent I am. So if we're limited by our own intelligence, how would we ever recognise or measure the intelligence of an AI that's more advanced than us? If an AI surpasses us, not just in memory or calculation but in reasoning, self-reflection, and abstraction, how would we even know?

Wittgenstein's lion

Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain

#17

Post by codeulike »

If you look at the stuff Turing was writing in the 1950s its fascinating because he really saw the potential of what computation was going to be able to do. There was a paradigm shift in thinking about possibilities here that he grasped in the very early days.

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/t_a...

It would be amazing to go and fetch Turing with a time machine and bring him to our time. Show him an iPhone, his face on the UK £50 note, and Wikipedia's list of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_openly_LGBTQ_heads_of_...

Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain

#18

Post by kranke155 »

captainbland wrote: post #10
PaulRobinson wrote: post #2

It's strange today to remember that playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI, but today we consider it much less so. I thought Turing's Test would be a good barometer of AI, but in today's World of mountains of AI slop fooling more and more people, and ironically there being software that is better at solving CAPTCHAs than humans, I'm not so sure. Add into the mix that there are reports of people developin…

I think with the Turing test, it's turned out to be a fuzzier line than expected. People are to various degrees learning LLM tells even as they improve. So what might have passed the Turing test in 2020 might not today. Similarly it seems to be a case that conversations with LLMs often start better than they end, even today - so an LLM might pass a short turing test but fail a very long one that goes into hundreds of…

We’ve clearly passed the Turing test I think. I can’t think of many ways I’d be able to detect an LLM reliably, if it was coded to just act as a person talking to me on discord.

Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain

#19

Post by dale_glass »

officehero wrote: post #16
pyman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar philosophical question: My dog doesn't know what I do for a living, and he has no concept of how intelligent I am. So if we're limited by our own intelligence, how would we ever recognise or measure the intelligence of an AI that's more advanced than us? If an AI surpasses us, not just in memory or calculation but in reasoning, self-reflection, and abstraction, how would we even know?

Wittgenstein's lion

We could test it. We know with certainty that computers play far better chess than we do.

How do we know? Play a game with the computer, and see who wins.

There's no reason why we can't apply the same logic elsewhere. Set up a testable scenario, see who wins.

Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain

#20

Post by card_zero »

dale_glass wrote: post #19
officehero wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wittgenstein's lion

We could test it. We know with certainty that computers play far better chess than we do. How do we know? Play a game with the computer, and see who wins. There's no reason why we can't apply the same logic elsewhere. Set up a testable scenario, see who wins.

Either the alleged super-intelligence affects us in some way, directly or indirectly by altering things we can detect about the world/universe, in which case we can ultimately detect it, or else it doesn't, in which case it might as well belong to a separate universe, not only in terms of our perception but objectively too.

The error here is thinking that dogs understand anything.

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