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by crabbone 473 days ago
I remember the article, and remember how badly it missed the point... The goal of writing a chess program that could beat a world champion wasn't to beat the world champion... the goal was to gain understanding into how anyone can play chess well. The victory in that match would've been equivalent to eg. drugging Kasparov prior to the match, or putting a gun to his head and telling him to lose: even cheaper and more effective.
1 comments

"The goal of Automated driving is not to drive automatically but to understand how anyone can drive well"...

The goal of DeepBlue was to beat the human with a machine, nothing more.

While the conquest of deeper understanding is used for a lot of research, most AI (read modern DL) research is not about understanding human intelligence, but automatic things we could not do before. (Understanding human intelligence is nowadays a different field)

Seems like you missed the point too: I'm not talking about DeepBlue, I'm talking about using the game of chess as a "lab rat" in order to understand something more general. DeepBlue was the opposite to the desire of understanding "something more general". It just found a creative way to cheat at chess. Like that Japanese pole jumper (I think he was Japanese, cannot find this atm) who instead of jumping learned how to climb a stationary pole, and, in this way, won a particular contest.

> most AI (read modern DL) research is not about understanding human intelligence, but automatic things we could not do before.

Yes, and that's a bad thing. I don't care if shopping site recommendations are 82% accurate rather than 78%, or w/e. We've traded an attempt at answering an immensely important question for a fidget spinner.

> Understanding human intelligence is nowadays a different field

And what would that be?