Understanding Moravec's Paradox • Hacker News Board

Re: Understanding Moravec's Paradox

#11

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 11:50 AM UTC

>> At its core, Moravec's paradox is the observation that reasoning takes much less computation compared to sensorimotor and perception tasks. It's often (incorrectly) described as tasks that are easy for humans are difficult for machines and visa versa.

From Wikipedia, quoting Hans Moravec:

Moravec's paradox is the observation that, as Hans Moravec wrote in 1988, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility".[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox

Note that Moravec is not saying anything about "much less computation" and he's also not talking about "reasoning", particularly since he's talking in the 1980's when AI systems excelled at reasoning (because they were still predominantly logic-based and not LLMs; then again, that's just a couple of years before the AI winter of the '90s hit and took all that away).

In my opinion the author should have started by quoting Moravec directly instead of paraphrasing so that we know he's really discussing Moravec's saying and not his own, idiosyncratic, interpretation of it.

Re: Understanding Moravec's Paradox

#12

Post by joe_the_user » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:43 PM UTC

hexhowells wrote: post #9

joe_the_user wrote: post #3

Any attention on Moravec's paradox is good imo because it is important. That said, the article starts with several problems. 1) Claims that it isn't a paradox, which is just silly. A paradox is a counter-intuitive result. The result is generally counter-intuitive whatever explanation you give. Zeno's paradox remains a paradox despite calculus essentially explaining it, etc. 2) Calls the article "Understanding Moravec…

The human ability to learn from few examples can be explained with evolution (and thus search). We evolved to be fast learners as it was key to our survival. If you touched fire and felt pain, you better learn quickly not to keep touching it. This learning from reward signals (neurotransmitters) in our brain generalises to pretty much all learning tasks

Everything can "be explained by evolution" but such an explanation doesn't tell you how a particular form serves a particular task.

Re: Understanding Moravec's Paradox

#13

Post by famouswaffles » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 9:55 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #12

hexhowells wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human ability to learn from few examples can be explained with evolution (and thus search). We evolved to be fast learners as it was key to our survival. If you touched fire and felt pain, you better learn quickly not to keep touching it. This learning from reward signals (neurotransmitters) in our brain generalises to pretty much all learning tasks

Everything can "be explained by evolution" but such an explanation doesn't tell you how a particular form serves a particular task.

The point is that to be good at 'learning from a few examples', the architecture of the human brain had to be constructed from a enormous amount of trial and error data. This is not something you can just brush off or ignore. 'not enough data' is a perfectly valid for a 'serious' explanation.

Re: Understanding Moravec's Paradox

#14

Post by ASalazarMX » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 7:30 PM UTC

From Wikipedia:

Moravec's paradox is the observation that, as Hans Moravec wrote in 1988, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility". This counterintuitive pattern happens because skills that appear effortless to humans, such as recognizing faces or walking, required millions of years of evolution to develop, while abstract reasoning abilities like mathematics are evolutionarily recent."

If that's the explanation, it's crazy to think what abstract reasoning evolved through millions of years would be like. Thought with layers upon layers above ours.