| "Similarly with chess - eventually we have good mnemonics for what make good plays, and can play blitz reasonably well." "let's be real - a lot of human symbolic reasoning actually happens outside of the brain" I was a chess master at age 10. Let's be real - when I play blitz and bullet chess, I am performing multi-level symbolic reasoning at multiple frames per second. In my brain. I am not an alien. I can do these kinds of symbolic calculations faster than 99.6% of the population mainly because I learned chess as a kid, making it a "native language", and I got good at it early so I spent much of my youth training my neurons with this perceptual task. My point is not to claim I'm a genius. There are dozens of players who can school me in bullet the way I can school most people. My point is that human beings DO symbolic reasoning, it is the core of our intelligence. Being able to take in different kinds of input, organize some of them into relevant higher level clusters, sort the clusters by priority, make a plan to deal with the highest prio clusters, act, rinse and repeat. Humans simply do not have the computational ability to make decisions based on raw perceptual data in real time. Our brains are designed to act on higher levels of symbolic meaning, and we have perceptual layers to help us turn reality into manageable chunks. In cognitive psychology this is referred to, not surprisingly, as "chunking": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology) Until DeepMind starts working on anything resembling chunking, I believe they are wasting their time and money. |