Re: John McCarthy R.I.P.

Subject	Re: John McCarthy R.I.P.
From	curt@kcwc.com (Curt Welch)
Organization	NewsReader.Com
Message-ID	<20111110160703.292$eN@newsreader.com> (permalink)
Newsgroups	comp.ai.philosophy, comp.programming
References	(4 earlier) <ecm463jzv08o.1jbeoy7ehjj0s$.dlg@40tude.net> <CYMuq.5252$Ff3.1191@uutiset.elisa.fi> <738sp4gb4v79.soj02a849hyl$.dlg@40tude.net> <20111110110300.634$qM@newsreader.com> <e7uluxlltfz5$.16a67tgzxck6e$.dlg@40tude.net>
Date	2011-11-10 21:07 +0000

Cross-posted to 2 groups.

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"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
> On 10 Nov 2011 16:03:00 GMT, Curt Welch wrote:
>
> > One thing I like to do, is reverse the question.  I personally think
> > neurons and nerve fibers are about the most shitty processing devices
> > you can find.  Only slightly better than marbles dropping though a
> > gate.  Lie this:
> >
> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcDshWmhF4A
>
> Cool, I remember a similar machine described in Scientific American a
> quarter century ago. But the most fascinating was one built out of
> Covey's Life gliders.
>
> > But we do know some other important things, like approximate
> > information bandwidth of the eyes, and touch, and of the control
> > signals needed to move our arms and legs.  And these bandwidth based
> > numbers show that the amount of information the flows thought the
> > brain, is trivial compared to our modern data processing munchies.
>
> That is not the bandwidth of "information", it is one of the
> representation of that information. The information space encoded by N
> bits has the cardinality of 2**N. This is far beyond any possible
> computational power when approached by brute force. Which means that
> there is more than enough room for David to beat Goliath.

Not sure what point you think you are making there.

Are you saying that we can't push a MBit/sec through a computer because
it's information space is 2^^(MBit)??  You know that's not important right?

Bandwidth doesn't tell us how much computation has to be performed on the
data as it passes through, but it gives us a starting point.

> > An iPhone has more bandwidth power than a
> > brain.  A HD movie, had more a fare more information than the visual
> > information our eyes feed us for example, but an iPhone can suck that
> > in over a wireless connection, uncompresses it, and display it, in real
> > time.
> >
> > There's just as much reason to argue that a device like an iPhone, when
> > it displays a video with audio, is doing more computation, than the
> > brain does.
>
> Yes, but these computations are not equivalent. Comparing them requires
> further premises, which might be satisfied or not.

Right.  It's just a guess.  We don't know the algorithm so it's all just a
guess.

> > So back to my turn the question ground idea.
> >
> > If neurons are such great information processors, lets look at another
> > question.
> >
> > How many neurons, does it take to make an iPhone?  Is it EVEN POSSIBLE?
> > (assuming you had needed senors and effectors to convert signals to
> > never impulses)?
> >
> > How do you wire a network of neurons to perform an video uncompress and
> > audio uncompress algorithm?  And how many neurons - which can only
> > process information at around 100 bits per second each, would it take?
> >
> > I don't think that 100 billion neurons could do it.
> >
> > Or lets try this one, how many neurons would take to duplicate the
> > Google search engine?  That is, an "intelligence" good enough, to tell
> > you the top 10 web URLs, for any short set of words you give it?  And
> > do it for millions a people every second?
>
> You could just ask to compute 100 digital places of sin(0.651)...
>
> (However, the respondent might use his iPhone for that. iPhone could not
> do so. Intelligence is when others do things for you! (:-))
>
> > I think neurons suck at information processing, and the great
> > complexity we find in the brain, is there MOSTLY not due to how "smart"
> > humans are, but to how much evolution had to bend over backwards with
> > massive parallelism to get useful function out of one of the worse
> > information processing technologies on the planet.
>
> Possible yes, but again it could be apples and oranges. We don't know how
> much the computational substrate of neurons of brain vs. electronic
> switches of CPU influences the complexity of the task. Your marble
> machine is an example. Or consider a pendulum, as a machine. That machine
> solves differential equation of pendulum. It does this quite good. How
> good is iPhone in solving this equation? I bet that iPhone is much worse.
> Is iPhone simpler or more complex than pendulum?

That's mostly nonsense.  The pendulum doesn't "solve the differential
equations" so the point is nonsense.

But, if were to try and replace the pendulum with computations, we might
have to implement the replacement with the computation of the differential
equations.  And in that sense, the various analog properties of the brain
might require similar back-flips if we try to do replace it with digital
hardware.  I don't believe such problems will arise, but until we have
solved that, we just don't know.

> >>> So that is an estimate of the complexity that one must to my opinion
> >>> create to have a genuinely human-level Artificial Intelligence.
> >>
> >> The crucial point is computability of general intelligence. Without
> >> any knowledge about what the intelligence actually does, all such
> >> comparisons are totally meaningless.
> >
> > Not totally meaningless.  They give us some bounds.  We can say the
> > computation needed to duplicate human intelligence is somewhere between
> > a small hand held battery operated processor, and a few warehouses full
> > of high end servers.
>
> The premise is that intelligence is computable, i.e. does not require
> incomputable elements in a way that would prevent their encapsulation.
> Though computers use such elements, they are encapsulated (e.g. real-time
> clocks and hardware random generators).
>
> > I strongly believe, that most people believe AI is far harder, and far
> > more complex than it really is, and that belief causes them to make
> > these computation estimates WAY too high - they don't want to think of
> > it as easy, because 1) that shows how great their failures have been at
> > trying to understand AI
>
> BTW, there is a question if the power of general intelligence were
> sufficient for understanding intelligence. This is not same as being
> intelligent. In which relation both problems are is unknown.

Yeah, it's a valid question, but I'm fairly sure I know what intelligence
is, and that question doesn't get in the way of the answer.  It's because
intelligence is the emergent property of an optimization process - a
learning process.  What we can "understand" is limited to what we can
learn, and the brain is too complex to understand itself in that way.  But
the underlying process that creates the complexity is not too complex to
understand - which is how we can expect to get around the problem of
intelligence trying to understand itself.  The answer is, we don't need to
understand ourselves, we only need to understand the learning process that
created our (adult) human intelligence.

> > and 2) it reduces what they are as a human, to something
> > insignificant - and most humans don't like to see themselves as
> > something insignificant.
>
> As well as the problem of identity. If any human being is exhaustively
> described by its state that would be the worst nightmare. However
> considering the way quantum physics works, I am rather sceptical about
> that.

-- 
Curt Welch                                            http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@kcwc.com                                        http://NewsReader.Com/

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John McCarthy R.I.P. RichD <r_delaney2001@yahoo.com> - 2011-11-04 13:17 -0700
  Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. RichD <r_delaney2001@yahoo.com> - 2011-11-09 13:17 -0800
    Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. casey <jgkjcasey@yahoo.com.au> - 2011-11-09 14:04 -0800
      Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2011-11-10 09:45 +0100
        Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. casey <jgkjcasey@yahoo.com.au> - 2011-11-10 01:24 -0800
          Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2011-11-10 12:14 +0100
        Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. Antti J Ylikoski <antti.ylikoski@aalto.fi> - 2011-11-10 11:38 +0200
          Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2011-11-10 11:54 +0100
            Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. Antti J Ylikoski <antti.ylikoski@aalto.fi> - 2011-11-10 14:09 +0200
              Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2011-11-10 14:46 +0100
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. seeWebInstead@rem.intarweb.org (Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) - 2011-11-13 18:00 -0800
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2011-11-14 12:07 +0100
                Towards true A.I. (was: John McCarthy R.I.P.) seeWebInstead@rem.intarweb.org (Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) - 2012-03-27 12:25 -0700
                Re: Towards true A.I. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2012-03-29 15:21 +0200
                Re: Towards true A.I. curt@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) - 2012-03-30 15:56 +0000
                Re: Towards true A.I. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2012-03-30 18:32 +0200
                Re: Towards true A.I. Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2012-03-30 14:20 -0700
                Re: Towards true A.I. Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2012-03-30 15:01 -0700
                Re: Towards true A.I. seeWebInstead@rem.intarweb.org (Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) - 2012-04-21 15:53 -0700
                Re: Towards true A.I. casey <jgkjcasey@yahoo.com.au> - 2012-04-21 18:47 -0700
                Re: Towards true A.I. "Chris Uppal" <chris.uppal@metagnostic.REMOVE-THIS.org> - 2012-04-22 10:03 +0100
                Re: Towards true A.I. Don Stockbauer <donstockbauer@hotmail.com> - 2012-04-22 04:10 -0700
                Re: Towards true A.I. Gary Forbis <forbisgaryg@msn.com> - 2012-04-02 19:46 -0700
                Re: Towards true A.I. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2012-04-03 09:51 +0200
                Re: Towards true A.I. Gary Forbis <forbisgaryg@gmail.com> - 2012-04-03 05:22 -0700
                Re: Towards true A.I. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2012-04-04 10:31 +0200
                Re: Towards true A.I. curt@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) - 2012-04-05 00:24 +0000
                Re: Towards true A.I. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2012-04-06 10:41 +0200
                Re: Towards true A.I. curt@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) - 2012-04-05 01:00 +0000
                Re: Towards true A.I. seeWebInstead@rem.intarweb.org (Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) - 2012-04-21 15:44 -0700
                Re: Towards true A.I. seeWebInstead@rem.intarweb.org (Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) - 2012-04-17 21:57 -0700
                Re: Towards true A.I. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2012-04-21 10:08 +0200
            Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. curt@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) - 2011-11-10 16:03 +0000
              Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. casey <jgkjcasey@yahoo.com.au> - 2011-11-10 12:16 -0800
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. "James" <no@spam.invalid> - 2011-11-10 13:00 -0800
              Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2011-11-10 21:50 +0100
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. curt@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) - 2011-11-10 21:07 +0000
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2011-11-11 11:43 +0100
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. curt@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) - 2011-11-12 22:38 +0000
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. casey <jgkjcasey@yahoo.com.au> - 2011-11-13 01:32 -0800
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. curt@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) - 2011-11-14 15:28 +0000
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2011-11-14 16:57 +0100
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. curt@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) - 2011-11-17 22:19 +0000
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2011-11-18 10:51 +0100
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. casey <jgkjcasey@yahoo.com.au> - 2011-11-14 11:42 -0800
                Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2011-11-13 12:45 +0100
    Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. RichD <r_delaney2001@yahoo.com> - 2011-12-14 10:28 -0800
  Re: John McCarthy R.I.P. seeWebInstead@rem.intarweb.org (Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) - 2011-11-13 16:00 -0800

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