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Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

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Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#131

Post by dTal »

Cybiote wrote: post #91
Houshalter wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that. Spiders can't beat a human at Go. Sure, they weren't evolved to do that. But how many generations of selective breeding do you think it would take to evolve a spider that could beat the best humans at go? Whereas if you made a spider hunting video game, I bet researchers could train AI's that could beat it within a few months. Video game playing has actually become a big area of research recently an…

I think you're missing the point there. Portia is able to, using just a handful of neurons (~600K), accomplish sophisticated vision tasks, complex planning, online learning and scheduling. Portia and insects in general are much more flexible to changes than our Neural nets. Changing objectives or a slight modification in the rules will often require retraining and a new design but insects can adapt to various lightin…

>Portia and insects in general

Spiders are not insects!

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#132

Post by mbrock »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #121
eternalban wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I sense/assume a missing /s in your post, Eli.) The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable.

>The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable. This displays a radical misunderstanding of the phenomena mentioned. The Halting Problem and logical incompleteness are the same thing underneath, and while they do hold in all formal systems, this never actua…

I never meant to imply "we know nothing, we had better give up."

What I meant was that the dystopian imaginations of AI (Terminator, paper clip maximizers, etc) involve the machines acquiring a strong moral certainty that doesn't ever pause for doubt.

If I've been reading too much of somebody it's probably Richard Rorty.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#133

Post by Cybiote »

dTal wrote: post #131
Cybiote wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point there. Portia is able to, using just a handful of neurons (~600K), accomplish sophisticated vision tasks, complex planning, online learning and scheduling. Portia and insects in general are much more flexible to changes than our Neural nets. Changing objectives or a slight modification in the rules will often require retraining and a new design but insects can adapt to various lightin…

>Portia and insects in general Spiders are not insects!

You're right! and I've known this but that distinction didn't come to mind as I was writing the post. It's not really relevant though, as my point was about how adaptable and surprisingly intelligent behaviours even these tiny, tiny creatures with barely more than a milliwatt (I'm guessing) to their name, can produce. And you know, and can be used in a similar way to either set union or intersection in natural language :)

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#134

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

dTal wrote: post #129
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> how many generations of selective breeding do you think it would take to evolve a spider that could beat the best humans at go? That's a different issue. Spiders, as all insects, don't learn . It seems that insects have some kind of firmware-style programming that can't change, because they don't have the cognitive ability to change it. This firmware can be unbelievably complex, like in the case of Portia spiders…

>Spiders, as all insects, don't learn >Spiders >insects For shame!

Fine, fine:

>> Spiders, as all arthropods, don't learn.

Better now?

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#135

Post by R_haterade »

jabl wrote: post #54
R_haterade wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, especially as I've been learning more about the difference between "nice" optimization problems with differentiable cost functions, and "messy" optimizations with less ideal cost functions. Is there any reading material you can recommend on the recent history of ML/AI for someone like me, with a dilettante's understanding of these problems and an interest in optimization?

https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7828 (Disclaimer: I don't know that much about ML/Deep Learning, the above was recommended by deeplearning.net and is what I'm slogging through ATM. I do have some background in "classical" statistics & optimization theory, and the above article is not that math-heavy)

Thank you!

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#136

Post by kordless »

archgoon wrote: post #46
glial wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of what we call 'AI' today is just fancy regression methods. No need to be so grandiose.

I'm pretty sure that comment was completely facetious. Note that The Singularity got lumped together with Docker containers.

Don't forget CoT vis-à-vis IoT.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#137

Post by Fordrus »

Cybiote wrote: post #91
Houshalter wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that. Spiders can't beat a human at Go. Sure, they weren't evolved to do that. But how many generations of selective breeding do you think it would take to evolve a spider that could beat the best humans at go? Whereas if you made a spider hunting video game, I bet researchers could train AI's that could beat it within a few months. Video game playing has actually become a big area of research recently an…

I think you're missing the point there. Portia is able to, using just a handful of neurons (~600K), accomplish sophisticated vision tasks, complex planning, online learning and scheduling. Portia and insects in general are much more flexible to changes than our Neural nets. Changing objectives or a slight modification in the rules will often require retraining and a new design but insects can adapt to various lightin…

This, this right here is the EXACT situation that causes all the bioinformatics guys to be EXTREMELY NERVOUS using biological analogies like neurons for machine learning topics. They are NOT actually analogous except in the shallowest ways.

First off, there's substantial evidence to suggest that in a biological systems, an activation profile of the neurological system is more analogous to what a Neural Network in machine Learning considers a 'neuron'- that means that when you consider the spider, you're not looking at 600K nodes, you're looking at 600,000 FACTORIAL. As in 600K!, or approx. 2x10^3,200,000.

Second, even THAT number may be substantially too small, because the STRENGTH, as represented by the number of connections a given node in a biological Neural net has to another node, can ALSO variably affect the performance/recall/whatever of the organism. I don't recall what the higheat known number of connections between two nodes is in humans, let alone spiders, but it is not only 2 or 3, it can be many more.

Portia and other insects are operating on an entirely different level, with different hardware, and a different operating system, than your Neural Network ENTIRELY - trying to compare the nodes-to-performance ratio of the spider vs. the DNN is not even wrong, it's like the Twilight Zone of every computer competent neuroscientist on this planet. Utterly and completely meaningless, except maybe in an inspirational sense, to flagellate your statisticians into feeling so inferior that they magically squeeze greater performance out of their networks, not because they cleverly utilized the fundamental differences between biological and silicon computer systems, but rather because they feel so bad about the comparison.

I apologize for my snooty tone- in college I argued with a professor about this, with me asserting that clearly, no one would every REALLY equate biological neurons with machine learning neurons one-to-one, and yet here you are, clearly he was right and I have lost our bet, I shall have to go back and eat a hat. ;)

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#138

Post by eli_gottlieb »

mbrock wrote: post #132
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable. This displays a radical misunderstanding of the phenomena mentioned. The Halting Problem and logical incompleteness are the same thing underneath, and while they do hold in all formal systems, this never actua…

I never meant to imply "we know nothing, we had better give up." What I meant was that the dystopian imaginations of AI (Terminator, paper clip maximizers, etc) involve the machines acquiring a strong moral certainty that doesn't ever pause for doubt. If I've been reading too much of somebody it's probably Richard Rorty.

>What I meant was that the dystopian imaginations of AI (Terminator, paper clip maximizers, etc) involve the machines acquiring a strong moral certainty that doesn't ever pause for doubt.

Ah. Well, considering that acquiring such a thing wouldn't really work out mathematically, fair enough.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#139

Post by eli_gottlieb »

eternalban wrote: post #123
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable. This displays a radical misunderstanding of the phenomena mentioned. The Halting Problem and logical incompleteness are the same thing underneath, and while they do hold in all formal systems, this never actua…

It seems irrelevant that, as of now, "any problem we care about" is sub-Turing-complete. We're still taking baby steps as a species and the relevant timelines in context of this thread are futuristic. Agreed? The point is that to maximally insist that "we can't know anything", and/or, "we can know everything" are both equally unreasonable positions. > Nowhere are we encountering the kind of radical, existential "we c…

>It seems irrelevant that, as of now, "any problem we care about" is sub-Turing-complete.

It's not irrelevant, it's a question of how you view the Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis: can hypercomputation occur in the physical world? If it can, then why and how are we somehow blocked from utilizing its physical manifestation to reason about the relevant questions of real-world events? If it can't, then why aren't systems with finite, if large or even growing, Kolmogorov complexity thus sufficient for all reasoning about the real world?

>S/he can address your concerns -- that was not my intent, but hopefully you agree that unreasonable insistence on maximalist positions inherently carries the danger of "political" authoritarianism.

My objection has been precisely that to insist on radical ignorance has led to an obnoxiously enforced liberalism.

>Your practical position reminds of a purported exchange between Wittgenstein and Turing, per Hewitt [ref].

I think Turing is just plain wrong here. Real mathematics did not originate by receiving ZFC with first-order logic as a revelation at Sinai and extrapolating theorems and structures from there! It began by formalizing ways to reason about the real world around us. When those original informal methods became insufficient in the foundational crisis of the 19th century, then mathematicians started inventing foundations to unify everything without paradox.

Notably, someone in the comments thread then mentions Curry's Paradox, which I looked up and found surprisingly underwhelming. Curry's Paradox is a perfect example of what Wittgenstein called a meaningless language game! Classical implicature X -> Y isn't always equivalent to the existence of a causal path "X causes Y", but natural-language implicature mostly talks about causal paths, so conflating the two in symbolic logic derives a "paradox".

>In fact as I am writing this little note, I am entertaining the thought that a veritable intelligent machine may in fact review the 3 (methodological) constraints noted, and shrug it off as practically unimportant. Or it may become alarmed. :)

I don't think that a machine limited to reasoning within a single mathematical structure or foundation can really qualify as "intelligent" in the human sense. Logical foundationalism is the wrong kind of thing to constitute a capacity to think.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#140

Post by lifeisstillgood »

apsec112 wrote: post #45
vonnik wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is moving fast. Faster than it has in a long time. In research circles, "supervised learning", or data classification problems, are considered solved. Consider the magnitude of that statement: If we have sufficient labeled data, we can predict those labels accurately on data we haven't been exposed to: fraud, faces, diseases, you name it. AI is moving fast for three reasons, which Andrew Ng summarizes neatly: 1) W…

"the way the French decided to fight German panzers with mounted cavalry in WWI" Quick note: I think this is historically inaccurate. In World War One, the Germans had essentially no tanks, unlike the British and French. In World War II, there's a popular rumor that Polish (not French) cavalry forces charged German tanks at Krojanty, but this is itself a myth (the cavalry attack was against infantry, tanks arrived af…

I did not know that about the cavalry charge occurring before tanks arrived (it is a little suicidal so is surprising)
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