[extropy-chat] Bluff and the Darwin award

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Russell Wallace wrote:
> 
> At the end of the day though, your claim boils down to the idea that you 
> can become a grand master at chess _without ever having played a game of 
> chess in your life_;

This sounds correct.  Certainly, without ever having played a game of 
chess against an external environmental player.  Possibly, without ever 
internally observing a specific chess game played by two algorithms 
against each other.  The latter option strikes me as silly in practice, 
that is, a suboptimal use of computing power, but doable if some 
superintelligence wanted to do it.

All the *useful* information about how to play chess against a generic 
opponent, derivable from any chess game ever witnessed and any 
experience of playing chess, is implicit in the rules of chess.

This is the startling point that I think you fail to grasp.

By the time a superintelligence is told the rules, before the game 
starts, in principle it knows everything it needs to know to beat any 
human player.  I don't expect the practice to be any different, not for 
a superintelligence.  I know this because the entire history of chess 
was generated, from scratch, by humans rather slowly following the rules 
of chess.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence