Re: John McCarthy R.I.P.

Subject	Re: John McCarthy R.I.P.
From	curt@kcwc.com (Curt Welch)
Organization	NewsReader.Com
Message-ID	<20111117171905.687$mU@newsreader.com> (permalink)
Newsgroups	comp.ai.philosophy, comp.programming
References	(10 earlier) <1m6he4d1l2mly$.bqkh3sdgrl5a$.dlg@40tude.net> <20111112173838.923$L5@newsreader.com> <5f3c82a4-9c4a-4282-8060-c831d82b18bd@u24g2000pru.googlegroups.com> <20111114102816.230$oU@newsreader.com> <yfp7nqie0r4o.3sixg8vf4isw$.dlg@40tude.net>
Date	2011-11-17 22:19 +0000

Cross-posted to 2 groups.

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"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
> On 14 Nov 2011 15:28:16 GMT, Curt Welch wrote:
>
> > casey <jgkjcasey@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> >> The ANN is a fancy way of viewing a statistical number
> >> crunching program which is what computers are good at and
> >> yes they can find solutions we can't find because we aren't
> >> doing that kind of number crunching.
> >
> > The brain is doing the same sort of thing John.  One way or another it
> > must be doing the same sort of thing.
>
> The point was that brain probably does it in *another* way, not by brute
> force, using very little explicit training.

I don't believe that' true for general human intelligent behavior. I
believe it's mostly trained.

> I think this is crucial to
> intelligence and really differentiates that from "stupid" machine
> learning. An intelligent system needs coverage of training lesser in many
> magnitudes.

I don't know what "coverage of training lesser in many magnitudes" means.

Are you saying it needs less training in order to act intelligent than say
stupid machine learning"?

If humans can learn faster, than also also be justified simply as a better
learning algorithm.  We aren't required to assume the brain has innate
ability beyond just better learning.

> > Our brains are just statistical number
> > crunchers that take the lessons of life and uses them to adjust its
> > synaptic weights and wiring to make it act differently in the future.
>
> It is worth to note that insects have practically no memory, learn almost
> nothing, yet are exposing a behavior more intelligent, complex and
> adaptive than computers armed with TBytes of memory. They do not crunch
> numbers. Even if they did, that would be useless because of lack of
> memory.
>
> Surely, one could argue that training happened per evolution, but I bet
> that if we took the very first insect from a drop of amber and revived
> it, it would behave no less complex than modern insects.

Yes, evolution is a learning process.  It evolves the design of life to
optimize it's fit to the environment for the purpose of survival.  Insects
are made to act "intelligent" by the long slow process of evolution.

Humans have been built by that same long slow process so any number of our
skills can, at a first guess, be thought of as created  by that process.

However, much of what an adult humans does, could not have been created by
evolution, because the behavior is too new relative to evolutionary history
to have  been hard-wired by evolution.  Evolution didn't hard wire us with
car driving skills.

But it could have given us various underlying ability, which we apply to
car driving, so it's difficult to know how and where that line between
nature and nature might be drawn.  It's an endless debate.

However, I personally don't buy that there is much of anything humans are
able to do, which we tend to call "intelligent" that was not learned.  So I
strongly believe, that the source of our real intelligence, is not skills
wired into us by the long slow learning process of evolution, but by our
ability to learn after birth.  The important thing evolution gave us was
the strong generic learning hardware.

-- 
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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