[ExI] Oxford scientists edge toward quantum PC with 10b qubits.

Dave Sill sparge at gmail.com
Mon Jan 31 17:21:09 UTC 2011


On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
> So when IBM creates a machine with the specific programming task of
> "Pass the Turing Test" that won't be intelligence either, because it
> was programmed to pass the Turing test... right???
>

Wrong, because the Turing test is designed to test general intelligence.

And there's no "pass the Turing test". It's not like the SATs, there's not
one single Turing test that, if passed, grants an AI a certificate of
intelligence. But an AI that accumulates a record in various Turing tests
against different interviewers equivalent to its human competitors would
demonstrate human-equivalent intelligence.

Again, I just don't think anyone has a clue how to define intelligence
> or consciousness.


Intelligence is pretty straightforward. See Wikipedia. What does
consciousness have to do it, though?


>  > The key is learning and understanding. It doesn't matter if it's a man
> or a
> > machine, or if the machine is using one or more clever tricks. A machine
> > that plays one game brilliantly but has no ability to learn other games
> > isn't intelligent.
>
> The right question here seems to me to be "Does Watson Learn?"
> Everything I have read seems to indicate that Watson knows answers to
> questions because Watson has processed a huge amount of free text from
> the Internet or perhaps Wikipedia or something. The point is that
> nobody sat down and programmed Watson to answer specific questions.
> This seems like "learning" by "reading" to me, and if so, that is a
> tremendous new capability (at least at this level of utility) for
> computers.
>

It's learning in the sense that Google "learns" what's on the web by sucking
down a copy of it. OK, it's a little more sophisticated than that since it
has to do some parsing. But does Watson learn from its mistakes? Does it
learn from its opponent's successes? I don't know. Does it understand
anything? I doubt it.

If you asked Watson questions about Jeopardy, I'd bet it could answer
> a lot of them. It isn't that it "knows" anything. I don't have any
> belief that Watson is conscious or anything like that.


Wait a minute...you just got done saying Watson learned all kinds of stuff
by reading it. Now you say it doesn't know any of that because it isn't
conscious?

-Dave
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