[mjburgess]

I dont see any single case of that. Rather in every case the goal posts were moved.

Can a computer play chess? No.

They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one.

That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a move.

And likewise everything else. A rock beats a child at finding the path to the bottom of a hill.

A rock "outperforms" the child. The challenge was never, literally, getting to the bottom of the hill: that's dumb. The challenge was matching the child's ability to do that anywhere via exploration, curiosity, planning, coordination, and everything else.

If you reduce intelligence to merely completing a highly specific task then there is always a shortcut, which uses no intelligence, to solving that task. The ability to build tools which use these shortcuts was never in doubt: we have done that for millenia.

[klmadfejno]

> They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one.

> That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a move.

Uh-huh. And how exactly do you play chess? Do you not, perhaps, think about future states resultant from your next move?

Also, Alpha Zero, with its ability to do a tree search entirely removed, achieves an ELO score of greater than 3,000 in chess, which isn't even the intended design of the algorithm.

A rock will frequently fail to get the to bottom of a hill due to local minimums vs. global minimums. A child will too sometimes.

[mjburgess]

> Uh-huh. And how exactly do you play chess? Do you not, perhaps, think about future states resultant from your next move?

Not quite. You'd need to look into how people play chess. It has vastly more to do with present positioning and making high-quality evaluations of present board configuration.

> rock will frequently fail to get the to bottom of a hill due to local minimums

Indeed. And what is a system which merely falls into a dataset?

A NN is just a system for remembering a dataset and interpolating a line between its points.

If you replace a tree search with a database of billions of examples, are you actually solving the problem you were asked to solve?

Only if you thought the goal was literally to win the game; or to find the route to the bottom of the hill. That was never the challenge -- we all know there are shotcuts to merely winning.

Intelligence is in how you win, not that you have.

[klmadfejno]

> Not quite. You'd need to look into how people play chess. It has vastly more to do with present positioning and making high-quality evaluations of present board configuration.

That is what Alpha Zero does when you remove tree search

> A NN is just a system for remembering a dataset and interpolating a line between its points.

Interpolating a line between points == making inferences on new situations based on past experience.

> If you replace a tree search with a database of billions of examples, are you actually solving the problem you were asked to solve?

The NN still performs well on positions it hasn't see before. It's not a database. The fact that the NN learned from billions of examples is irrelevant. Age limits aside, a human could have billions of examples of experience as well.

> A NN is just a system for remembering a dataset and interpolating a line between its points.

So are human brains. That is the very nature of how decisions are made.

> Only if you thought the goal was literally to win the game; or to find the route to the bottom of the hill. That was never the challenge

So then why did you bring it up as an example other than to move goal posts yet again? I can build a bot to explore new areas too. Probably better than humans can. Any novel perspective that a human brings, is, by definition, learned elsewhere, just like a bot.

> Intelligence is in how you win, not that you have.

Sure, and being a dumbass is in how you convince yourself you're superior when you lose every game. There are many open challenges in AI. Making systems better at learning quickly and generalizing context is a very hard problem. But at the same time, intellectual tasks are being not only automated, but vastly improved by AI in many areas. Moving goalposts on what was clearly thought labor in the past is just handwaving philosophy to blind yourself from something real and actively happening. The DOTA bots don't adapt to unfamiliar strategies by their opponents, and yet, they're still good at DOTA.

[mjburgess]

Humans do not interpolate between billions of examples. A human cannot be shown billions of examples in a lifetime.

[richk449]

Let’s say that you have the ability to know the state of every neuron, and the interconnect map between them, at all times. You watch a chess player make a move, determine what is going on, and define the process the brain follows as an algorithm. Now that you have an algorithm, you have a very powerful piece of silicon execute the algorithm. Does that piece of silicon have intelligence? You would probably say no, since simply executing a pre-defined algorithm is a shortcut. Intelligence means the ability to develop the algorithm intrinsically in your head.

So fine, we take a step back. Instead of tracing all the neurons as they determine a chess move, we trace all the neurons as they start, from a baby, and learn to see and to understand spatial temporal behavior and as they understand other independent entities that can think like they do and as they learn chess and how to make a move. Then we encode all of that into algorithms and run it on silicon. Is that intelligence? To me, it sounds like it is just a shortcut - we figured out what a brain does, reduced it to algorithms, and ran those algorithms on a computer.

What if we go back further and replay evolution. Is that a shortcut?

To be fair, you did claim that the ability to adapt and make tools is what distinguishes real intelligence. But I wonder if ten years from now, you will saying that a tool making computer is just a shortcut.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

I think intelligence is more generally how an agent optimizes to be successful, objectively and subjectively, across a wide variety of different situations.

[Falling3]

> Can a computer play chess? No. > They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one.

This is a perfect example of moving the goal posts. The objective was never to simulate a human playing chess.

[andrewprock]

The moving of the goal posts is being done by those who claim that chess algorithm are in any sense intelligent.

The same holds for artificial intelligence broadly. It is as far from intelligence as a can opener.

[TchoBeer]

At what point would you be willing to concede that an algorithm is actually intelligent? What would be required for that?

[andrewprock]

The definition of algorithm and intelligence are mutually exclusive. Maybe you are asking a different question?

"When will we discover an algorithm for intelligence?"

[richk449]

If we understand something, we can describe it with an algorithm.

If algorithms for intelligence are by definition impossible, then understanding intelligence is by definition impossible.

So if true intelligence is something beyond our current understanding of the world (beyond algorithmic description). To me, this feels like god in the gaps applied to intelligence.

[andrewprock]

Understanding does not imply computability. The halting problem is the classic example of this.

[klmadfejno]

If a lookup table can predict human decisions with high accuracy given access to its senses and feelings, then either a human is just another can opener or intelligence isn't real.

[mjburgess]

The objective was to build an intelligent machine. Games were chosen as they, in humans, require intelligence.

They thought that AI would come out of building systems that can replace humans: sure, but only insofar as you preserve the use of intelligence.

If you replace with a shortcut, you havent built an intelligent machine.

[klmadfejno]

The objective was to make a machine that could beat anybody at chess. Nobody on the Alpha Zero team believes Alpha Zero is an example of general AI. Teaching a system to understand a complex system is a necessary subcomponent of general intelligence.

[mjburgess]

> Teaching a system to understand a complex system is a necessary subcomponent of general intelligence.

This is my point. Weak AI is not a component of general AI. A chess game futhers the project zero amount.

General intelligence is a way of being embedded in an environment; is the mechanism of furnishing narrow intelligence with content.

It is not a formal challenge, it's at best an engineering one. And a bioengineering one, in my view.