[ExI] Some new angle about AI

[Stefano Vaj]

2010/1/7 The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com>:
> Well what other "high-level chemical reactions" are there to compare life to? Flames don't run away when you try to extinguish them. Motile bacteria do.

How would that qualify as a quantum effect? :-/

> I think a lot of the quantum computation goes on below the conscious threshold, things so simple that most people take for granted. Things like facial recognition which happen nearly instaneously with the brain but take standard computers running algorithms quite a bit of time to accomplish.

Of course, organic brains have evolved to do (relatively) well what
they do, but this does not tell us anything about their low-level
working, nor that they would escape the Principle of Computational
Equivalence as far as their... computing features are concerned (the
jury may still be out on some other aspects of their working). The
fact that a Motorola processor used to run Windows less efficiently
than an Intel processor does not really suggest that the second is a
quantum computer.

And plenty of phenomena which have apparently little to do with
quantum effects are more or less heavy to emulate or computationally
intractable. See the weather. Or, once more, the plenty of examples
discussed in a New Kind of Science...

> Shooting billiards, playing dodgeball, writing a novel, seducing a lover, I imagine a lot of quantum computing goes into these things.

Why?

Conversely, I am not aware of *even a single feature* of any
hypothetical quantum computer which is easily emulated by organic
brains. Take for instance integer factorisation. Or any other prob
where quantum computing would make a difference. "Besides
factorization and discrete logarithms, quantum algorithms offering a
more than polynomial speedup over the best known classical algorithm
have been found for several problems, including the simulation of
quantum physical processes from chemistry and solid state physics, the
approximation of Jones polynomials, and solving Pell's equation. No
mathematical proof has been found that shows that an equally fast
classical algorithm cannot be discovered, although this is considered
unlikely. For some problems, quantum computers offer a polynomial
speedup. The most well-known example of this is quantum database
search, which can be solved by Grover's algorithm using quadratically
fewer queries to the database than are required by classical
algorithms. In this case the advantage is provable. Several other
examples of provable quantum speedups for query problems have
subsequently been discovered, such as for finding collisions in
two-to-one functions and evaluating NAND trees." (from Wikipedia).

If you had a quantum computer in your head, all that should be a piece
of bread, once you have learned the appropriate algorithm. It is on
the contrary the case that we are *way* better at, say, additions of
small integers or Boolean algebra.

And, by the way, most natural organic brains have no chances
whatsoever to learn how shooting billiards, playing dodgeball, writing
a novel, seducing a lover, no matter how much training effort you put
into it, even though their underlying principles appear pretty similar
to one another...

-- 
Stefano Vaj