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

[Richard Loosemore]

John Clark wrote:
> On Jan 28, 2011, at 8:52 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> 
>>>  Richard Loosemore wrote:
>>
>>> We are a long way away from AGI, unless people start to wake up to the  
>>> farcical state of affairs in artificial intelligence at the moment.
>>
>> Finally something we can agree on.
> 
> Have you seen this?
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE 
> 
> This was just a test run, there is supposed to be a 3 day competition 
> between the 2 all time best human champions and the machine sometime in 
> February. 

Yes, but do you have any idea how trivial this is?

The IBM computer playing Jeopardy is just a glorified version of 
Winograd's SHRDLU.  With enough information it can home in on answers to 
simple questions.  Doing that kind of stuff is like winning a barellized 
fish-shooting context:  if you have a big enough encyclopaedia in there, 
and you do a fast enough search, you get near to the relevant facts. 
But that is not the same as structured intelligence.

As I write these words I am sitting here getting ready to teach some 
students enough physics and vector calculus that they can understand 
Gauss's theorem, Maxwell's equations, the subtleties of EM induction ... 
and these kids will (if we're lucky) be able to understand all that in a 
couple of months' time.

But if I tried to have a conversation with that IBM Jeopardy computer 
about these things, would it be able to start understanding, if I took 
it real slow?  No, not at all.  If you know something about the 
techniques and the tricks that the IDIOT BLUE team are using to get 
their baby to do that stuff, you will know that this is not a step on 
the road, it is a dead end.

What is sad about all this is that AI has been through so many of these 
cycles.  Thinking that dictionary lookup plus a few extras is all you 
need for intelligence.  This is true.  It is just that the "few extras" 
are 99.999% of the problem.




Richard Loosemore