[visarga]

> there is nothing that they could do that we couldn't in principle understand ourselves

It is trivial to prove otherwise - AlphaZero move 37. After 4,000 years of gameplay (yes, it is that old!) we still didn't get this level of insight in its strategy.

The core ability of humans might not be learning but search. Creativity is just an aspect of search. AlphaZero was both searching and learning. It's what we do as well, we search and learn. Science advances by (re)search. Art searches for meaningful expression. Even attention is search. Even walking is - where will I place my next foot?

Why is search a better concept that creativity? Because it specifies both the search space and the goal. Creativity, intelligence, understanding and consciousness - all of them - specify only the subjective part, omitting the external, objective part. Search covers both, it is better defined, even scientifically studied.

[HPsquared]

AlphaZero was an example of "learn by doing", not education.

[pixl97]

That's weird, when I went and got an education, a huge portion of that was 'doing'.

[HPsquared]

Fair, education is the wrong word really. That said there's a difference between learning by exercises (AlphaGo) and learning "in production". Synchronous vs asynchronous or something, is there a better name?

[dotsam]

> It is trivial to prove otherwise - AlphaZero move 37. After 4,000 years of gameplay (yes, it is that old!) we still didn't get this level of insight in its strategy.

Are you saying that AlphaZero contains knowledge that we can't understand, even in principle? It is somehow beyond science, beyond all explanation?

> Why is search a better concept that creativity?

Search suggests a fixed set of options, whereas what is crucial is creating new ones.

[fhdsgbbcaA]

A very accomplished older professor once told me in grad school that “research” was a process of first intuiting patterns, and then “searching” for further examples of said pattern, and then “re-searching” until you had statistical confirmation.

I very much agree.

[dotsam]

You don't keep searching until a point of "statistical confirmation". This implies you have arrived at an infallible truth. Instead you look for ways you could be wrong, and try to correct any errors you find.

For instance, if you guess 'all swans are white', you don't ever get "statistical confirmation" that your guess was right. When you eventually see a black swan, you find out you were wrong. Then it's time to come up with a new theory.

[skybrian]

There are very large search spaces. Consider the space of all text documents (Borge's Library of Babel), which includes all research papers and all novels. Also, the space of all mathematical theorems, the space of all images, all videos, all songs, whatever evolution searches over.

These cover many creative activities.

But it's true that some search spaces are less well-defined.