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MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

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Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#81

Post by chrisdevereux »

bermanoid wrote: post #47
yc-kjh wrote: post #9

Idiocy: My thermostat has three possible beliefs: 1) It is too warm in here. 2) It is too cold in here. 3) It is just about right. Minsky is wrong about AI in the same way that McCarthy was wrong. McCarthy really "believed" that his thermostat had three possible beliefs, and that his thermostat really "believed" one of them at any given time. http://Books.Google.com/books?id=yNJN-_jznw4C&pg=PA30&lpg=PA... Searle debu…

Are you seriously bringing up Searle's Chinese Room as an argument against AI research? According to Wikipedia, "The Chinese room argument is primarily an argument in the philosophy of mind, and both major computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers consider it irrelevant to their fields." Right on. First off, philosophy of mind is 100% irrelevant to modern AI research, which is more concerned with cr…

> Philosophers have always been misinterpreting AI research's goals, which is why nobody in AI has ever paid them any attention, and which is also why they'll never be relevant to anything. Even if they're right, they're not asking questions that anyone cares about.

That's totally unfair. Serious philosophers object to the misapplication of AI research to answer philosophical questions about the mind (not necessarily even by AI researchers), not AI in general. It's basically the the same complaint you have against Searle being invoked against AI. Don't sink to the level of the person you're replying to with mindless tribalism. Your definition of 'anyone' appears to be AI researchers.

Fwiw, although Searle made it onto the undergraduate phil mind courses, he isn't really taken that seriously by contemporary philosophers.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#82

Post by randallsquared »

yc-kjh wrote: post #38
vidarh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The computer is still doing only syntax, even while appearing to do semantics. Why do you assume people are not doing the same? > But humans really do semantics. Nobody questions this, or challenges it, because it is self-evident. It is no more self evident than your claim that computers don't do semantics. Your argumentation is circular: IF computers can't do semantics, and IF humans do, then clearly the humans an…

You apparently don't understand how computers work. There is no "meaning" associated with any variable or its value, and there cannot be.

This is the part you challenged? We're skipping right past the part where vidarh seemed to assert p-zombiehood? ;)

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#83

Post by Jtsummers »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #58
Jtsummers wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand yc-kjh's point, their "semantics" are really just more complicated syntactic rules. No real understanding occurs within the code. Or, the code doesn't understand what it's doing it's just doing what it's been instructed to do by us. (On that note, the code doesn't understand anything because the code is a non-entity, it's a thing, like a book or a car engine. A car engine doesn't understand the fuel i…

>If I understand yc-kjh's point, their "semantics" are really just more complicated syntactic rules. No real understanding occurs within the code. Excuse me, but did you actually intend to express that anything which can be encoded in second-order logic is just syntax and has no semantic meaning ? Because a reasonably sophisticated type system can in fact express arbitrary propositions in second-order logic; the resu…

No. I actually disagree with the point. I was trying to provide an interpretation of what had been written by the OP. And based off their response, my interpretation matched their intended meaning.

EDIT: I wrote this when I wasn't fully awake. I agree with the OP slightly, but that's because the OP is using "semantics" in a different way than how computer scientists (like myself) would use it. OP's definition of syntax is, basically, "rules". OP's definition of semantics is "understanding", not "meaning".

So by that definition, computers really only seem to be following more and more complex rules. OP seems to be of the opinion that the "semantics" side relies on something outside of encodable rules. In that regard, a computer doesn't understand its program anymore than a car engine understands its pistons. That doesn't mean that we can't encode meaning into our programs (what computer scientists intend with the word semantics). It also doesn't mean that I think OPs definition of semantics (understanding) is fundamentally impossible for computers (see my other post in this thread), just that, as far as I've seen and understand, it hasn't happened yet.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#84

Post by Double_Cast »

Houshalter wrote: post #72
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I just now finally understood what was going on there: a randomized map matches no territory . Enlightenment achieved.

But it does match a territory. It's just a random one

Let's suppose you're lost in the Amazon. Would you not prefer a professionally-drawn map of the Amazon over a "map" I whimsically scribbled while blindfolded? After all, my map might not correspond to the Amazon, but it must correspond to something.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#85

Post by demallien »

kylebrown wrote: post #80
bermanoid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously bringing up Searle's Chinese Room as an argument against AI research? According to Wikipedia, "The Chinese room argument is primarily an argument in the philosophy of mind, and both major computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers consider it irrelevant to their fields." Right on. First off, philosophy of mind is 100% irrelevant to modern AI research, which is more concerned with cr…

I like this deconstruction of Searle's Chinese Room, by Scott Aaronson. He calls Searle's argument a "non-insight": http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html

That link was the most interesting thing I've read on HN all day. Thank you!

My favorite quote: "As a historical remark, it's interesting that the possibility of thinking machines isn't something that occurred to people gradually, after they'd already been using computers for decades. Instead it occurred to them immediately, the minute they started talking about computers themselves. People like Leibniz and Babbage and Lovelace and Turing and von Neumann understood from the beginning that a computer wouldn't just be another steam engine or toaster -- that, because of the property of universality (whether or not they called it that), it's difficult even to talk about computers without also talking about ourselves."

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#86

Post by sib »

Random Marvin Minsky story: About 15 years ago I invited Guy Kawasaki to speak to a student group at MIT and he accepted. I was able to schedule in about an hour to tour him through the MIT Media Lab, in the evening. He and I were wandering from area to are when we came upon Minsky, working in a lab. Being a former CS undergrad from a different school, I was pretty excited, so I decided to go for it and introduce myself and Guy to this famous person. Guy said, "Wow - you're the Marvin Minsky?" Without batting an eye, Minsky said, "Wow - you're the Guy Kawasaki?" And then proceeded to spend ten minutes walking us through what he was working on.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#87

Post by blueblob »

yc-kjh wrote: post #9

Idiocy: My thermostat has three possible beliefs: 1) It is too warm in here. 2) It is too cold in here. 3) It is just about right. Minsky is wrong about AI in the same way that McCarthy was wrong. McCarthy really "believed" that his thermostat had three possible beliefs, and that his thermostat really "believed" one of them at any given time. http://Books.Google.com/books?id=yNJN-_jznw4C&pg=PA30&lpg=PA... Searle debu…

To what are you referencing with the word Idiocy? Minsky winning a prize?

  "But the evidence is overwhelming. The evidence cannot be denied."
OK, so provide the irrefutable evidence instead of your opinionated, anecdotal "evidence" that computers cannot associate meaning with a symbol. You make an untestable claim that computers cannot do semantics, perhaps they can and we haven't built the right type of computer. Then you use circular logic to "prove" that a computer can only do syntax. Of course a computer that can only do syntax can only do syntax. The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.

I have not read the Nagel book, and I am not saying you are wrong, I am saying that nobody is going to believe you if you don't substantiate your argument with real evidence.

If your "idiocy" claim was against Minsky, I would urge you to read even a small portion of his work, particularly Causal Diversity/the Future of AI [1] which is a short technical paper where he talks about how computers will not be able to advance in many areas until they can understand word meanings (semantics).

[1] http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/CausalDiversity.html

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#88

Post by gahahaha »

kt9 wrote: post #7

My favourite minsky story is the one where he commissioned a grad student for a summer to solve "the computer vision problem once and for all". Its a great anecdote to illustrate how so many have underestimated the difficulty of problems in computer vision in robotics and AI.

I guess this was before Moravec's paradox was "discovered" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#89

Post by SatvikBeri »

gahahaha wrote: post #88
kt9 wrote: post #7

My favourite minsky story is the one where he commissioned a grad student for a summer to solve "the computer vision problem once and for all". Its a great anecdote to illustrate how so many have underestimated the difficulty of problems in computer vision in robotics and AI.

I guess this was before Moravec's paradox was "discovered" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

Minsky was one of the ones who formulated Moravec's paradox, and the difficulty of computer vision probably played a big role.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#90

Post by jes5199 »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #51
ScottBurson wrote: post #3

I still remember a story I heard Gerry Sussman tell about Marvin, from when Gerry was a grad student. Gerry was programming a neural net (or something like it; I forget exactly what) and told Marvin he was planning to use a random number generator to initialize the weights in the network "so it won't have any biases". Marvin replied, in his careful, laconic way, "Of course it will have biases. You just won't know wha…

You know, I just now finally understood what was going on there: a randomized map matches no territory . Enlightenment achieved.

I've seen some suggestions that the human brain is full of random pattern generators, and that some kinds of learning are selecting which pre-existing patterns most reliably match the external stimuli
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