Live data from Hacker News

AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

diginomica.com

181–190 of 192 posts

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#181
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The learning from game itself was curve fitting, the Deep in Deep Reinforcement Learning usually means some difficult function is replaced by a deep neural network, approximating optimal values (for moves) trained on gameplay samples, usually in sense of rewards/punishments for reaching certain states; in games they could rank e.g. good/bad moves, winning states, losing states etc.

Right. But the curve itself, was invented by the machine.

I think the curve is defined by the rules of the game, and the machine learned some details of it that humans hadn't figured out yet.

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think intelligence has for some time already been boiled down to curve fitting, even for humans. No, the book actually makes an important point about this. For instance, let's take a counterfactual. How do you know what would have happened if Barcelona had played Lionel Messi in goal over the latest season? They've never done this, there are no data points for you to fit. The situation almost never arises that an…

If we say that goalkeeping requires certain skills, and being an outfielder also requires certain skills, these skills being graphed on a chart, its simple to see that Messi would not perform well as a goalkeeper, and this is still curvefitting. If it turns out that the goalkeeper and outfielder have a lot of overlapping skills, we might fall back and refer to a probability curve of things that normally happen; "play…

> If we say that goalkeeping requires certain skills... If it turns out that the goalkeeper and outfielder have a lot of overlapping skills...

That's kinda the problem here. Once you have a model fitting curves is fine. But you need a structure from somewhere.

> players require practice to excel in their position

The problem with this is there's no data. Nobody gets to play a position they haven't practiced for. Yet you still somehow came to the right conclusion.

Anyway Pearl is much better at explaining this than I am.

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#183
This is a potentially interesting identity for AI, that is, as a curve-fitting function...

I postulate (but cannot at the present moment prove!) that if there is proof such that:

a) AI fits curves

and

b) That if all polynomial numbers (NX^M .. AX^2 + BX^1 + CX^0) are in fact curves...

then (perhaps)

c) Perhaps there is a link between polynomial numbers (as curves) and AI... that is, perhaps all AI can be thought of as a function with a polynomial solution, such that F(X) = NX^M .. AX^2 + BX^1 + CX^0, with F(X) being the AI in question...

I leave it to mathematicians, logicians, and people who do dimensional reductions/transformations -- to prove or disprove this...

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Causal reasoning is one thing that is lacking. But what about creativity? What about drive and desire? What about belief and the will to fail on the road to success? What about collective intelligence and the need to peer up in efforts? What about emotional intelligence? Hi, I work at one of the intersections of machine learning with certain schools of thought in neuroscience. The following is based entirely on my…

Admittedly, that list is an arbitrary poke into areas of debate in your fields of profession. As a take on your interpretation of creativity: I would argue that the act of forming new and valuable propositions is not related to emotion or aesthetics per se. Aesthetic theory is observing a very narrow subset of creative processes. And even there, our transition from modernism into the uncertainty of the post-modernist…

>Now we could start on the assumed role of complex neurotransmitters in the creative process of the brain and the trivial way reinforcement learning rewards artificial agents, but that would push the scope of this comment.

You can't really separate emotion and aesthetics from the neurotransmitters helping to implement them! They're considerably more complex than anyone usually gives credit for.

Likewise, to form a valuable proposition, you need a sense of value, which is rooted in the same neurological functionality that creates emotion and aesthetics.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2666711/

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly, that list is an arbitrary poke into areas of debate in your fields of profession. As a take on your interpretation of creativity: I would argue that the act of forming new and valuable propositions is not related to emotion or aesthetics per se. Aesthetic theory is observing a very narrow subset of creative processes. And even there, our transition from modernism into the uncertainty of the post-modernist…

>Now we could start on the assumed role of complex neurotransmitters in the creative process of the brain and the trivial way reinforcement learning rewards artificial agents, but that would push the scope of this comment. You can't really separate emotion and aesthetics from the neurotransmitters helping to implement them! They're considerably more complex than anyone usually gives credit for. Likewise, to form a va…

> Likewise, to form a valuable proposition, you need a sense of value

Point taken

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#187
There's a lot of talk in this thread about what intelligence is. Personally I found the AIXI model from algorithmic information theory a very convincing definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI

I'm surprised it's not more generally accepted as _the_ definition. Note that Markus Hutter the main author is currently working at DeepMind.

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#188
post #84

Some really insightful discussion of the possibilities and limits of ML can be found on Les Fridman's AI podcast. Especially good were interviews with Yann LeCunn, Jeff Hawkins, Elon Musk and Francois Chollet. One memorable quote from LeCun "There is no intelligence without learning." Here's a link to the LeCun interview, though many aothers are excellent. https://lexfridman.com/yann-lecun/

The interviews with researchers and engineers in the field seem like they'd be interesting, but I don't see it for Musk. What special insights does he offer into AI?

Tesla is deeply invested in self driving technology. He discussed the importance of data in the project, and he believes that Tesla is collecting 20x more data than any other player. He also believes that driverless will be more than 100x safer than humans fairly soon.

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#189
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've seen that threshold crossed with neural agents like AlphaGo which can be reasonably described as thinking. It decides if moves are good or bad after a little pause for processing, its decisions improve with time, it has an opinion on the state of play, the opinion is formed using basically the same data as a human, different iterations of the neural network can have a different opinion but there is a link betwe…

> We've seen that threshold crossed with neural agents like AlphaGo which can be reasonably described as thinking. I don't recall ever reading in a technical paper, or in an interview, a leader in the field of ANNs claim they were thinking. If you have, I'd like to see a reference. Most are fairly honest about the differences between artificial neurons and real ones, and between human cognition and what ANNs are doin…

Is “thought” even a well defined scientific term? I doubt neuroscientists write about it either.

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too hold the view that artificial intelligence is not reliant on computers. Sufficiently complex business logic is impossible for a single person -- even the CEO -- to have an end-to-end view (much less have a significant influence on). The emergent behavior of large companies fits a definition of an AI today; human "decision makers" are increasingly just reviewing and approving the output of algorithms. I think th…

Yeah, I mean, it's a slippery slope, but one worth sliding down. Is autopilot AI? If so, it was invented in 1914. Are speed governors AI? That was James Watt. Are if-then statements AI? That's the basis of human laws, dating back thousands of years. Are corporations AI, or rather superintelligences, because they are groups of people bound by bylaws? If so, the whole damn world is AI through and through and machine le…

Yeah, I guess that's my point. Humanity has been guided by largely autonomous systems for much of our existence, but only recently have those systems become sufficiently complex as to remove the possibility of human intervention in some processes due to the complexity involved -- nobody can intervene if nobody can understand the whole story.

I think this is why late-stage capitalism feels so bad to live under: these artificial systems (corporations), by design, stand in direct opposition to our humanity. They exist to prevent our humanity from getting in the way of their perpetual growth by abstracting any ethical problems away so that no human is faced with an ethical dilemma. Which explains why the world so often feels like a dystopian nightmare.

Post reply on HN