The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain
#2It'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 developing psychological disorders when exposed deeply to LLMs, I'm not sure they are good replacements for therapists (ELIZA, ah, what a thought), and they seem - even with a lot of investment in agentic workflows and getting a lot of context into GraphRAG or wiring up MCP - to be good at helping experts get a bit faster, not replace experts. And that's not software development specific - it seems to be the case across all domains of expertise.
So what are we now chasing for? What's the test for AGI?
It's definitely not playing games well, like we thought, or pretending to be human, or even being useful to a human. What is it, then?
Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain
#3It'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…
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Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain
#4It'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…
playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI
Was it? Alpha-beta pruning is from 1957 they had a decent idea chess of what human-beating computer chess would be like and that it probably wasn't some pathway to Turing-test-beating AI.
Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain
#5It'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…
How about: the ability to independently implement ways to manipulate the local environment for their own benefit or self-preservation?
Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain
#6It'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’d argue we have AGI, at the level of a child; now we’re debating further steps, such as adult AGI and super intelligence.
But because AI is not like us, we have different results at different stages — eg, they’ve been better at arithmetic for a hundred years, games for twenty, and slowly are climbing up other domains.
Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain
#7It'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…
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 iterate. In an environment it wasn't specifically designed for by humans.
(not claiming most humans can do that)
Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain
#8It'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?
Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain
#9It'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…
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?
Re: The average chess players of Bletchley Park and AI research in Britain
#10It'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 rounds.