[eru]

Seems unlikely, that never worked in the past. And humans don't actually use logic (especially formal logic) to come up with anything. They just use it to justify what they came up with.

Not even mathematicians think in terms of logic when trying to solve problems.

[auggierose]

Of course mathematicians also think in terms of logic. It’s what you learn when you study mathematics, you soak it up automatically, although few study logic explicitly. And before 2015 a machine beating worlds best go player also seemed pretty unlikely.

[eru]

I've studied mathematics.

You only do (formal) logic as an afterthought when communicating your proofs to other people or writing them down. Otherwise it's mostly intuition.

[auggierose]

I've studied mathematics, too. Yes, formal logic is an afterthought when you do mathematics. But formal logic is just an explicit representation of what goes on internally in a mathematician. Or at least that's how I approach formal logic (most logicians don't). I would describe these internal processes inside a mathematician (and outside, when used for communication) as intuition + "logic to keep intuition in check". Sounds like ML + logic to me.

[subjectsigma]

There are already tons of systems (for example Google Translate) that combine rule-based reasoning with probabilistic reasoning. Looks to be working to me.

[eru]

Interesting. Do you have any sources on Google Translate using rule-based reasoning?

[subjectsigma]

Machine Translation, by Thierry Poibeau, 2017.

[eru]

Alas, that was around the time Google Translate switched to Neural Networks:

See https://blog.google/products/translate/found-translation-mor... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Neural_Machine_Translat...

It doesn't look like they are still using any rule-based reasoning?

The blog post says:

> With this update, Google Translate is improving more in a single leap than we’ve seen in the last ten years combined. [...]

Which seems pretty strong evidence to me that moving away from rule-based reasoning or even a hybrid approach that includes rule-based reasoning, was a clear win?

[YeGoblynQueenne]

It's not "strong evidence" but a strong claim.