On Tue, Nov 15, 2005, Shachar Shemesh wrote about "Re: [off topic] A new project - automatic translation": > >This is getting wildly off-topic, but... > but interesting. > >.. > In other words, this is a case where a human programmer has to analyze > the problem, decide on a solution path, decide where, if at all, to > apply neural networks, and then program the whole thing. >..
There's no argument that programming such a thing will take effort. Artifical intelligence doesn't mean some sort of "hey look, it's magic, I'll get a working program without doing any effort!". Rather, the idea that the programmer, while being an expert programmer, does not have to be an expert chess player (to use this example), and the program can "learn" how to play chess by watching the games of grandmasters. There's a division of labor, if you will, by the programmer who can program, and the "teachers" who can play chess extremely well but couldn't program if their life depended on it. To return to the translation issue, the idea that Uri raised was that he wanted to write a translation program, and perhaps spend a good deal of effort doing so, but since he doesn't really know how to translate French to Swedish (for example), he himself cannot teach the program to do that, and he hopes that the program could "pick up that skill" from experts of these languages. By the way, chess is probably not a very good example for this division of labor (programmer vs. teacher), because with the strength of modern computers, even the most naive, brute-force, tree-walking algorithms with the most simplistic heuristic functions, can actually play great chess. A programmer is enough, and you don't even need an expert chess teacher. These sorts of simplistic algorithms makes my Palm Pilot beat me at chess every time, and a stronger computer beat even the best chess player in the world. Now you're probably saying: 'well, chess doesn't actually require intelligence to play, and these programs should not be called "artificial intelligence"'. Kurzweil also points out to this interesting phenomenon, of the drifting definition of "artificial intelligence". He claims that by definition, a computer will never be called "intelligent", because whenever we learn how to do something with a computer, we'll suddenly say that this task does not require intelligence. He gives as examples OCR and speech recognition, tasks once thought to be too "intelligent" for a computer to undertake, but now that computers do them casually we call these tasks un-intelligent, and move our intelligence bar a little higher. -- Nadav Har'El | Tuesday, Nov 15 2005, 13 Heshvan 5766 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |"[I'm] so full of action, my name should http://nadav.harel.org.il |be a verb" -- Big Daddy Kane ("Raw", 1987) ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
