Re: Number: It's Origin and Evolution

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Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 22:11:48 +0000 (UTC)

 
ekurtz99@WhoKnowsWhere.com wrote
The fundamental mistake here is the implcit assumption that advances in
machine understanding of language are problems of storage and cpu speed;
they are not; if that's all they were, machines would be able to
converse at speeds slower than a human but in a realistic way. Obviously
they cannot.

Ragland:
I agree. That's why computers which have the most storage and cpu speed
should not be equated with intelligence.

William Morse wrote:
I realize that advances in language are more than problems of storage
and cpu speed. In particular, the classic computer architecture is well
suited to logic problems but ill suited to the kind of processing
involved in language.

Ragland:
I agree.

William Morse:
But in any case your statement is incorrect. Ants cannot converse at
speeds slower than a human - they cannot converse at all.

Ragland:
They certainly have ways of communicating with each other although they
don't have language as humans do.

William Morse:
Even chimps can only converse haltingly after much specific training.

Ragland:
I don't equate a chimp's inability to speak human language is really
related to storage capacity and cpu speed of a computer. I would argue a
chimp, even without human language, is more intelligent than today's
computers. As you state the classic computer architecture is well suited
to logic problems but ill suited to the kind of processing involved in
language. But that is bound to change over time.
 
Kurtz:
In the case of ants the reason is obvious; but it may that the chimp has
enough brain matter to support language ability; but it doesn't have the
necessary brain organization. Language is not learned in the way that
algebra is learned; we are born with the capacity to acquire it from our
social group.

William Morse:
It is likely that it takes a very high degree of complexity to begin to
converse - and current computers are nowhere close to that level.

Kurtz:
You are once again confusing hardware with software complexity. Faster
machines aren't necessarily more complex. Do you have a background in
CS?

William Morse:
So it is too early to tell if advances in cpu speed and storage will
eventually allow computer speech even with the current limited
understanding of how language is constituted.

Ragland:
Kurtz hasn't asserted that mere advances in cpu speed and storage will
eventually allow computer speech. As he has mentioned mere increased cpu
speed and storage doesn't translate into allowing a computer to use
language and converse.

Kurtz:
This doesn't follow at all; suppose I believe I have figured out how to
implement conversational ability in software. I implement my design in a
program; I then run the program by asking it sensible real-world
questions; if the machine that is running the software is slow compared
with the ideal for my system it may take (say) a month to respond, but
the response will be no different from what I would have got on a much
faster system, say in seconds; I can then resond to the response, wait
another month etc etc. Conversation does not have to be real time. As
long as the responses indicate that the system understood the questions
and was able to construct human-like answers, I can claim to have
cracked the problem.

If you cannot see the point I am making, then you do not understand this
issue.

William Morse:
It is one of the conceits of the AI profession, or at least of its lay
apologists, that Moore's law will solve every current AI problem. It
won't. There is the small matter of the software.
But the software is also evolving, albeit at a much slower rate than the
hardware.

Kurtz:
This is the Discovery Channel version of AI history.

Ragland:
Why have you harped on how cpu speed and increased storage doesn't
equate with a computer being 'intelligent' when Kurtz has repeatedly
made it clear the two aren't really related to the ability of a computer
to be intelligent i.e. use language? You state, "In particular, the
classic computer architecture is well suited to logic problems but ill
suited to the kind of processing involved in language." You concede
software is evolving but at a lower rate. You also state, "It is one of
the conceits of the AI profession, or at least of its lay apologists,
that Moore's law will solve every current AI problem. It won't." While I
agree it will still be a long time before computers are as intelligent
or more intelligent than humans I perceive a negative bias on your part
regarding the idea of computers becoming intelligent. I personally think
it would be a disaster for computers to become more intelligent than
humans. Indeed, that is one of the reasons Hawking advocates genetic
engineering of humans so that we remain on par with the intelligent
machines we have created.

Quite honestly, this whole field is so complex one would have to go to
school for years to write knowledgeably indepth about it. Below is just
the field of DNA computing and molecular nanotechnology...two fields I
know almost nothing about but which have the potential to effect
computers in the future.

http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~neal/1996/cosc185-S96/dax/

Not all the links work

"It's uncertain whether intelligence has any long term survival value."
Stephen Hawking

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