--- On Sat, 9/20/08, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>A more appropriate metaphor is that text compression is the altimeter by >>which we measure progress.
>An extremely major problem with this idea is that, according to this >"altimeter", gzip is vastly more intelligent than a chimpanzee or a two year >old child. > >I guess this shows there is something profoundly wrong with the idea... No it doesn't. It is not gzip that is intelligent. It is the model that gzip uses to predict text. Shannon showed in 1950 that humans can predict successive characters in text such that each character conveys on average about 1 bit per character. It is a level not yet achieved by any text compressor, although we are close. (More precise tests of human prediction are needed). Don't confuse ability to compress text with intelligence. Rather, the size of the output is a measure of the intelligence of the model. A compressor does two things that no human brain can do: repeat the exact sequence of predictions during decompression, and ideally encode the predicted symbols in log(1/p) bits (e.g. arithmetic coding). These capabilities are easily implemented in computers and are independent of the predictive power of the model, which is what we measure. I addressed this in http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/rationale.html Now if you want to compare gzip, a chimpanzee, and a 2 year old child using language prediction as your IQ test, then I would say that gzip falls in the middle. A chimpanzee has no language model, so it is lowest. A 2 year old child can identify word boundaries in continuous speech, can semantically associate a few hundred words, and recognize grammatically correct phrases of 2 or 3 words. This is beyond the capability of gzip's model (substituting text for speech), but not of some of the top compressors. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
