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by dghughes 2400 days ago
Or people who say "The computer thinks...". No it's a machine that only does what people make it do.
2 comments

We've seen that threshold crossed with neural agents like AlphaGo which can be reasonably described as thinking. It decides if moves are good or bad after a little pause for processing, its decisions improve with time, it has an opinion on the state of play, the opinion is formed using basically the same data as a human, different iterations of the neural network can have a different opinion but there is a link between it and the previous one.

I don't see a test that majorly distinguishes it from a human. It appears to be following the same process with a few tweaks around the edges. There are some exceptions in the 2-5 situations in Go where a human can actually use optimised logic to determine what will happen; but they aren't the meat of the game.

> We've seen that threshold crossed with neural agents like AlphaGo which can be reasonably described as thinking.

I don't recall ever reading in a technical paper, or in an interview, a leader in the field of ANNs claim they were thinking. If you have, I'd like to see a reference. Most are fairly honest about the differences between artificial neurons and real ones, and between human cognition and what ANNs are doing with data.

Is “thought” even a well defined scientific term? I doubt neuroscientists write about it either.
Chess is one of those areas where humans have developed computer-like abilities, such as exhaustive search. What's interesting is the appearance of intuition-like movement in modern chess computers, but is it ... intuition?
I feel that's just a semantics rabbit hole. "Think" is too broad of a term to be picky about.