On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 6:39 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: > http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ > > The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think > > "...Take Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that bested the chess grandmaster > Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue won by brute force. For each legal move it could > make at a given point in the game, it would consider its opponent’s > responses, its own responses to those responses, and so on for six or more > steps down the line. With a fast evaluation function, it would calculate a > score for each possible position, and then make the move that led to the > best score. What allowed Deep Blue to beat the world’s best humans was raw > computational power. It could evaluate up to 330 million positions a second, > while Kasparov could evaluate only a few dozen before having to make a > decision. > > Hofstadter wanted to ask: Why conquer a task if there’s no insight to be had > from the victory? “Okay,” he says, “Deep Blue plays very good chess—so what? > Does that tell you something about how we play chess? No. Does it tell you > about how Kasparov envisions, understands a chessboard?” A brand of AI that > didn’t try to answer such questions—however impressive it might have > been—was, in Hofstadter’s mind, a diversion. He distanced himself from the > field almost as soon as he became a part of it. “To me, as a fledgling AI > person,” he says, “it was self-evident that I did not want to get involved > in that trickery. It was obvious: I don’t want to be involved in passing off > some fancy program’s behavior for intelligence when I know that it has > nothing to do with intelligence. And I don’t know why more people aren’t > that way...”
I was just reading this too. I agree. > This is precisely my argument against John Clark's position. > > Another quote I will be stealing: > > "Airplanes don’t flap their wings; why should computers think?" I think the intended meaning is closer to: "airplanes don't fly by flapping their wings, why should computers be intelligent by thinking?". > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
