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What Computers Really Can't Do
What can't computers do? Why don't we hear more about their limitations, along with the mushroom clouds of hype about their limitless capabilities? By now, the public might well expect computing to restore the environment, cure cancer, prolong life and reason through the world's most complex and intractable problems.
Not so fast.
The good news, writes author David Harel in his new book, "Computers LTD: What They Really Can't Do," from Oxford University Press, is that computers are indeed incredible, capable of amazing feats.
The bad news is that they also face major problems, serious limitations on what they can ever be expected to accomplish, and that few people, even with advance computer science degrees, really grasp that there are fundamental barries no amount of hardware, software, brainpower or money can ever overcome.
Harel explores the boundaries of computable and noncomputable problems, and find's a lot to be pessimistic about. "..our hopes for computer omnipotence are shattered. We now know that not all algorithmic problems are solvable by computers, even with unlimited access to resources like time and memory space." In fact, he adds, problems relating to computer programs, particularly running time and memory space -- he calls these difficulties computational complexity -- severely limit just how much computers will ever be able to do.
Harel, who's a mathematics and computer science dean at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, may have written one of the first books in recent memory that focuses on the limits of computers. For a community grown understandably arrogant by years of hubris and hype, this is probably a much needed dose of reality. Why focus on the negative?, the author asks. His answer:
l. To satisfy intellectual curiousity. Computer scientists need to know what can be computed and what can't.
2. To discourage futility. Computer experts who tackle problems that are simply insoluble need to stop wasting their time.
3. To encourage the development of new paradigms. Many of the most exciting areas of computer science research -- including parallelism, randomization and quantum and molecular computing would not be advancing at their current speeds if it weren't for increased understanding about what computers can't accomplish.
4. To make possible the otherwise impossible. (The author saves much of the answer to what might be possible a surprise in the book, so I can't give it away here).
Harel acknowledges that our society could barely function without them. But he warns against the widespread mythology that computers will be able to do almost anything we can think up.
Typically, Harel writes, when people have problems making computers do what they want them to do, their excuses that fall into three categories: more money would buy larger, more sophisticated computers; being younger would permit us to wait longer for time-consuming programs to be terminated; being smarter could lead us to solutions we don't currently seem able to find.
But the truth is that computers are simply not equal to solve many complex problems. Harel raises, then mostly sidesteps, the debate over whether computers can be endowed with human-like intelligence. "In its wake," he writes, "a host of questions arise concerning the limits of computation, such as whether computers can run companies, carry out medical diagnoses, compose music or fall in love."
For non-techs, this book is on a pretty high plane. Even with Harel's impeccable credentials and engaging writing style, plenty of concepts are rough for someone who's not a programmer or computer scientist to grasp, especially when he gets to tiling and algorithms.
But the question is significant. The limitless potential power of computing has all kinds of implications for technology, education, culture and politics. We do need to know more about what's realistic. This splash of cold water is welcome, and more than a little shocking.
Purchase this at ThinkGeek.
Flip open any biology or medical publication and see how many details of biology are still being discovered, thus couldn't be simulated even if you had a computer powerful enough for the job.
Has anyone a little more sophisticated than Katz read this book? Is this just another rehash of decidability and intractability? Or is there something new here?
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Cars can't do everything.
This is prolly a good book and all but get real people, computers are just tools and the audience this book was intended for knows this. The people that think computers alone are going to find a cure for cancer wont be reading this because they are probably mac users and their idea of programming is html.
I like meat helmets.
It is for the best, anyway. I don't want to be superceded mentally and made redundant, like the industrial revolution made my muscles redundant. So I am very glad conscious computers are impossible. It would be dangerous for us if they were.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
Why doesn't this review tell us at least one thing that computers can't do. Is this a P-time vs NP-time maths book? Is it a social problems book? What? Just tell us!
Does my bum look big in this?
Where did this idea come from precisely? Maybe i don't read to same books, see the same movies, etc. but I've never seen computer porteyed as all knowing and/or all powerful. From Star Trek to the Matrix, even the most advanced computers seem to need human intervention to function and/or are vulnerable to human sabotage and control. I really don't see where the author, or katz, came up with this idea.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
Is it just me, or did he just tell us, "Here's this book ... I won't tell you what's in it, but you can go buy it and find out." Even if you didn't want to ruin the book's 'surprise', you could at least tell us whether it's worth reading. What we ended up getting here was a question suited for 'ask slashdot', along with an attached advertisement.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Aspirin will not give us world peace, the internet will not make an end to human sufferings and most importantly, no amount of complaining /. posters will make JonKatz any smarter.
Next time he should write something about how xmas presents are not brought to you by Santa Claus.
Real life is overrated.
Apparently it's only shocking to Katz and to other true believers of the one faith of computers©. Anybody involved with computers that has any semblance of sanity realizes that computers are not capable of solving every problem/question humanity has ever formulated. And the chances are that they never will. Even people that are into far-future sci-fi style writing usually keep a realistic stance about such things. Dan Simmons, a great author of many styles, wrote of a future with AI (autonomous intelligences, not artificial) computer units that were so intellectually superior to humans that most humans could not even fathom the depths of their 'minds', yet even these great beings couldn't answer some of the most fundamental of questions. Who are we? Why are we here? Who else is out there? How do we do
The whole premise of pure (and completely unfounded) belief in the abilities of machines is just as laughable as any religiously clung to belief. If you believe without question, then you lose your ability to see reality. If Katz sees this as a splash of cold water, then perhaps he needs to regain some perspective.
BTW, has anyone else noticed that Katz has shifted gears over the past few weeks from the "computer people are the smartest, bestest, wonderfullest, most misunderstood" to "computers suck, and they are damaging our society beyond repair"? I wonder if he just had a major system crash a few weeks ago?
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Well, some would argue that people are also just automata who respond in a predictable manner, if you know everything about their life from conception till the moment of the action in question. The issue is that humans are so complex, and have such a complex web of influences and forces, that the human mind cannot reliably predict what another human may do. In some sense humans, it could be argued, are psuedo-random, we are predictable, just not to any intellect we have yet spwaned or encountered.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
So now this Harel decides that a problem is insoluble? If a team of researchers try to solve a problem, should they stop because Harel says it can't be done? Who does this guy thinks he is, the All-knowing deus? Isn't it so that the effort to solve a problem can yield other results? Isn't that what science is about?
How to make a sig
without having an idea
Lets assume that the current trend of rapid increases in computing power continues a decade or two.
;)
The most interesting problems crunched on today (IMHO) with computers are simulation and complex problem solving. The latter meaning various algorithms for finding optimal solutions to combinatorial problems.
Simulation meaning the ability to predict the behavior of physical structures, chemicals, processes, etc.
Combinatorial optimization solving traveling salesman, design - VLSI, chemical engineering, etc. using algorithms such a simulated annealing, genetic or eveolutionary, nueral networks, etc.
These types of processing will continue to grow in power and flexibility to a point where we can design incredibly complex systems entirely in silico.
Once this is accomplished, the majority of human 'work' will consist of manual labors, or 'creative' tasks. The engineering types of processes, VLSI, CAD/CAM, structure design, will be crunched out by computers at a fraction of the cost, using incredibly powerful eveolutionary processes to find solutions no human could dream of.
This is already happening in quite a few fields of expertise.
Thus, we will be the eternal dreamers, searching for the endless areas of which to apply our computing power, and provide direction for its use. The rest will be done by the black box brutes.
At least, that's my opinion...
Book Reviews
Genetically altered love Penguins: The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
Washing the dishes
Taking out the garbage
Cooking
Going to the bathroom
Eating
Breathing
Drinking
Dying
This article really ticks me off!
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
Except no one, in this generation at least, is saying anything of the kind. Where as we have Katz and countless other people on slashdot saying that they can, are, or will frequently to varying to degrees. Not everyone on slashdot is either an engineer or a programmer. In fact, I'd wage that the vast majority of frequent readers are between the ages of 16 and 20...those who generally don't have much professional experience.
Sure they can. Go into your preferences menu, and check the box marked "JonKatz". You will never see one of his stories on Slashdot again as long as you're logged in. Stop whining.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Get me a date.
----
Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say yes.
It explains what algorithms are, what complexity and the "big-O" notation are, and has a good discussion of P vs NP, and decidability.
Given this background, I suppose this book also covers the "computers can't do everything" from that angle.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Harel, [...], may have written one of the first books in recent memory that focuses on the limits of computers.
...
Search on Amazon.com (or others) for books on "Complexity Theory" or "Theory of Computation". I get 277 hits.
We now know that not all algorithmic problems are solvable by computers,
Now? This has been known for 50 years (The halting problem, etc). The book might be very good, but please don't make it sound like this is news.
-- Slef
I'd probably disagree with most of this book. There's no reason that even a Turing machine couldn't simulate a problem solving device as complex as the human brain, provided you'd figured out all of the physiological properties that contribute to intelligence.
But even before that goal is reached, computers are going to go a very long way in enhancing our own intelligence and problem solving capabilities. Hell they already have.
Another point is that the solution to some of these problems may not take the form this guy expects. We could change the laws of physics by building a virtual reality indistinguishable from reality, putting everyone into it and then changing the rules.
Computers are tools and they will solve whatever problems we tell them to, eventually.
It is for the best, anyway. I don't want to be superceded mentally and made redundant, like the chemical revolution made my mixer-attachments redundant. [ok, so I'm reaching here.] So I am very glad conscious humans are impossible. It would be dangerous for us if they were.
--Peripheral's Arrival, The
2. To discourage futility. Computer experts who tackle problems that are simply insoluble need to stop wasting their time.
4. To make possible the otherwise impossible.
Computers are unable to interpret English to discover typos in words spelled correctly. Forget the unsolvable problems, I prefer insoluble ones more. They go so much better with tea.
They can't make the author appear smarter either. First I will state computers cannot solve a problem, then I will say I will use computers to solve problems which were once impossible.
This makes me think of Clifford Stoll's book "Digital Snake Oil"... it's been around for many, many years now, and although Stoll may fall far outside the run-of-the-mill geek stereotypes of action and perspective, his point of view on the criticism of the internet boom surely isn't a needle in a haystack.
:) I'm sure you can find it on b&n or amazon's sites.
If you want to dig a little deeper into the sociological aspects of these subjects than Harel's book reaches, you may want to read Clifford Stoll's "Digital Snake Oil".
And if you don't know who Clifford Stoll is, read "The Cuckoo's Egg" first.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
Huh. That really flies in the face of what we thought about the power of computers back...when? Circa Fritz Lang's Metropolis?
Perhaps the above should read:
"My hopes for computer omnipotence are shattered. I now know that not all algorithmic problems are solvable by computers, now that I've read through decades' worth of essays written by some of the greatest computer scientists ever to live."
information wants to be expensive...nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Has anyone read the book and actually care to tell us what the author believes computers can't do? Sheesh.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What if computers eventually "think" like Data in The Next Generation? Suppose Data's successor is smarter than Captain Picard? Would you fear being led by a machine like the crew of Enterprize feared letting the computer pilot the ship in one episode? If you worry about a Terminator future, you need only look to Asimov's 3 Laws of Robots. No decent computer system today is without failsafes, and neither should the computer systems of the future.
s/reknowned/renowned/
From what I understand though JK's description, Mr Harel is probably talking about the NP-hard problems, ie problems which take exponential time to solve (exponential being related to their "size", eg solving the travelling salesman problem for N cities takes k*exp(N) steps).
Although those problems are effectively unsolvable through the classical, algorithmic way, quite a lot of them can be solved using the most recent AI techniques - the drawback being that the solution is not 100% guaranteed optimal. Genetic Algorithms [?], for example, are the most powerful optimization tool that ever came out of AI. It can deal with the travalling salesman's problem (see one version here), just as well as other technique such as "Ant colonies"
Furthermore, complexity theory (which deals with "computability") only holds for Turing machines. DNA / quantum computers do not fell in the "NP-cursed" category of computers.
Mr Harel's thoughts, while being perfectly snesible as far as his own field is concerned (Turing-like algorithmics), should not be taken as holy scripture. Digital calculators are only a couple of decades old. It took thousands of years to fully exploit the power of the steam engine. We can try to imagine what "computers" will be like in 30 years from now, but expecting such a forecast to be accurate would be foolish.
Thomas Miconi
GiraffeSville, a place anyone can call home
I agree that computers have limitations. They are just tools, to be used like any other. As a tool, the degree of skill the user of the tool possesses determines the quality of the final product. I don't agree however with the statement of "[One of the goals is] To discourage futility. Computer experts who tackle problems that are simply insoluble need to stop wasting their time." This is the type of apathy that will harm the realm of computing, not help it. If you look at the past, all of the things that have brought forth progress and innovation have been accomplished through people using tools to overcome with was thought to be impossible. Sailing around the world, human flight, space travel, etc. All of these were at one time thought to be just dreams, things that would never come to fruition. So, maybe this book should focus more on the point of that while currently computers might not be able to solve a certain algorithm lets come up with a better way of computing that might one day solve this problem. Instead of telling them that what they are doing can't be done, lets put the challenge out to them and see if they can turn this impossible dream into reality.
Pay attention to the second definition here...
insoluble (n-sly-bl)
adj.
1.Abbr. insol. That cannot be dissolved: insoluble matter.
2.Difficult or impossible to solve or explain; insolvable: insoluble riddles.
Taken as a theoretic algorithm-crunching entity, computers are both FSMs and Turing machines, since the two are equivalent.
Of course you could edit your preferences and rid yourself of katz .. but that has been mentioned already.
Here's a better solution: if you run Unix, edit "/etc/hosts" and add this line:
If you run windows, simply get a large pair of all metal scissors and cut the power cord to your computer. The shock should hopefully kill you, and if not, your computer will be disabled. Thereby protecting you from katz. (unless he shows up at your house.)
This is similar to cavemen remarking on how it would never be possible to touch that big white circle in the night sky. New technology and new ideas are always seen as 'magical' because they extend the cultural notion of what is possible. (I'm thinking of radio, the telephone, television, jet propulsion...). Marconi's friends labelled him as insane when he said that he had found out how to send messages silently through the air . And the recent exponential increases in computing power are surely bringing AI closer, which is again going to change the way we look at what is and is'nt possible. Wait and see.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
(Haven't read it yet, BTW)
People trying to make a point often seem to invent an "prevailing opinion" to argue against. I don't think that many people really think computers are omnipotent. Good idea for a book though.Another good reason for tackling this point is that understanding what computers *aren't* highlights some really odd things about what minds *are*.
Books like this one, "The Emporer's New Mind" and "Godel, Esher, Bach" do do seem to imply some truly wierd things about the capabilities of human brains.
Incidentally, does anyone know of any research into analogue computing approaches to artificial intelligence? It seems fairly clear from the maths that nothing which is limited to carrying out tasks a Turing machine could perform will ever shed that much light on the nature of the mind
Computers can't play a decent game of Go.
The brute-force approach used for chess is simply out of question since there are too much possibilities. As for move catalogs, they can be used for some situations, but not for game strategy. And strategy, as opposed to tactics, is what go is about.
Until someone figures out a way to teach a computer to think for himself, a good go computer player won't exist. I don't think we'll be seeing that soon.
JP
--- Worst tagline ever.
Ooh... ooh... I know! They can't solve the halting problem! Do I get participation marks?
-y
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
Any operation that CAN be done is called a "computable problem" (great surprise, that one!), and ANY computation device with sufficient time and memory can solve ANY computable problem.
The "classic example" that University text books the world over still use to this day is the infamous "halting problem" as an example. Can you write a program that, given ANY code, determine if it'll ever halt?
The answer is no. You can't. You =can= write programs that'll work for a =range= of programs. (It takes no great feat to write a program that'll check "Hello World".) But a generic program is impossible.
(The proof of that involves feeding the program itself. Since knowing whether it'll ever stop is dependent on knowing whether it'll ever stop, you have an infinite loop. The computer's molecules will decay long before it ever gives an answer.)
One of the great challanges "Hard" AI scientists is this. If the human brain is a computational device, is reverse-engineering conciousness a computable problem? If not, then (by definition) the scientists can't do it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Reliably run Microsoft Products.
like a new computer, this book was obsolete before it hit the bookshelves. this book represents the most dangerous kind of hide your head in the sand type of thinking. as old A.E. once said, there are no absolutes, you simply can't make blanket statements that something is impossible. in times past it was impossible to go over 60 mph, because you couldn't breathe. in times past, much of what we take for granted today, was impossible. nay sayers stifle creativity, and hold back innovation. the only limits to what computers can do are current computer technology, current computer software, and human imagination, and the first two are constantly changing. computers may not be a lifeform, but computer science is, and it will continue to grow and adapt to meet all challenges, unless people stop trying to do something, because they have decided it can't be done.
from webseter's
insoluble
a: not soluble,
b: having or admitting of no solution or explanation.
The Second most powerful computer in the universe already figured out the answer: 42 !!!
Warning: Some might consider this flame bait. Caveat Emptor.
Katz is a hack. He doesn't really care to think or challenge anything. All he wants to do is make a name for himself, sell "books", etc. To do that, when you have mediocre skills and limited intelligence, you must find your niche. Katz does this by being the loudest voice in the heard.
When computers are "hot", he'll be their greatest cheerleader. When the internet is hot, he'll be there too. But when the Dot Coms start crashing, and there is a large sentiment that he can cash in on AGAINST it, he'll be there just as quickly. Never mind consistency. Just read his stuff over the past couple of years.
I see Katz as a Clintonesque figure, albeit, without the charisma, intelligence, etc...always holding his finger out to the wind of public opinion or, rather, his niche audience of teenage "geeks".
Jon.. this is not news, groundbreaking, earthshattering, or even very good writing.
You are, once again, preaching this to those who know better. Most anyone who reads slashdot understands enough about machines to know that its not the hardware that is really the issue.. its our ability to put what we want in the form that a computer can digest.
Yes, that monstrous gigaflop machine they built can model the weather and atmoshperic issues on a global scale.. but it takes human (or in MS case, simian) fingers to write what the computer *needs* to do in order to get the desired results.
Asking "what cant computers do" is like asking "what cant a 9 mm box wrench do". The computer is a tool, nothing more, and you have to know how to use the tool to get any beneficial work from it. Yes, you can use the above mentioned wrench as a hammer or a prybar, but they arent terribly effective as either.. it is much better tightening or loosening a 9mm nut.
THe better question would be "What limitations do programmers have now that keep computers from doing wonderful things". In which case the answer would be: lack of vision, in some cases, lack of information to code into a program, and lack of *need* for all the fantastical things that people seem to expect computers to be able to do.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
What?!? The ideas this book covers are taught in every CS program at every university in the world.
...that I have an infinite amount of tape right here in my pocket.
Basic Chaos Theory [?].
The very essence of being conscious is an ability to behave in a random fashion, also known as free will
There's no such thing as true randomness on the non-quantic scale. What we call "free will" is the result of a (highly structured) bunch of intercommunicating neurons. While the process of decision (ie will) remains one of the darkest parts of the Neurosciences realm, we already have enough clues to figure out where we should look (can you say "basal ganglia" ?).
Thomas Miconi
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
The problem with postulating "it can't be done" is that sometimes useful areas of research get blocked - this happened with neural nets for a long time. It was postulated that these nets could never implement an XOR function. This is only true for nets which lack an intermediate layer.
Of course, today neural nets can implement an XOR...
So it's easy to miss something when you declare something as unsolvable. Even when you have a mathematical proof (as in the neural net example).
It follows that "can't be done" should only be used with the utmost care - a whole book of "unsolvables" seems ludicrous in this respect - unless he's merely re-iterating what everybody knows already.
The idea of "if you knew everthing you could predict the behavoir" has yet to explain things like inspiration or creation. How did Edision "just know" that he could create a light bulb. Anyone whose ever done something creative knows what I mean. There is a place from which ideas come that is outside the human mind. Otherwise, growth and change would not be possible. Think about it...
Some moderator marked the above as flamebait. That's bollocks. This is a highly valid point and totally on-topic for the subject of "what computers can't do".
"Contentious" does NOT equal flamebait. Stuff like that NEEDS to be discussed. We can't just pretend a subject will go away just because some people feel passionately about it.
SEWilco is quite right. You can't model what you don't know.
In addition, computers require absolute parameters. Not only can you not model what you don't know, but you can't do worthwhile simulations (ie. those used for human life or death decisions) based on educated guesses.
I only have respect for anti-vivesectionists who are vegans- not only in diet, but in clothes, tools, furniture and cosmetics too. Either animals are something we eat, or something we don't. Any half-way stance is hypocrytical.
Since there is absolutely no chance of any nation enforcing veganism on it's population, anti-vivisectionism is ultimately futile.
What I personally feel doesn't come in to it. There is no point arguing for a law if it will never get voted in or be enforced.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Flamebait == does not fit in with the majority opinion. You know, thinks like abolishing slavery, that was flamebait.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There's evidence (Rosen) that life can't been effectively simulated.
"Computers are just simple turing machines. This means that everything they do is utterly predictable."
You obviously don't run Windows on your PC.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
It took thousands of years to fully exploit the power of the steam engine.
The steam engine is only a few hundred years old, and the development of the first practical steam engine (by James Watt) kicked off the Industrial Revolution. If you date computers to WW-II, the steam engine is only about three times older than computers.
If you date computers to Charles Babbage, which is not entirely unreasonable, then computers and steam engines are nearly the same age!
While it's true that a steam-driven novelty was known in classical times, it was not an engine capable of doing practical work. While a hollow sphere with directed vents will spin when heated by an external flame, it doesn't generate much usable power.
In contrast, a "steam engine" works by filling a sealed chamber with steam, then rapidly cooling it causing the steam to condense and the external air pressure to move a piston. This requires good metallurgy (so the chamber doesn't collapse) and tight manufacturing tolerances (so the piston will slide, but not let air leak around it), and a dozen other things to keep it from seizing up within hours. Calling the classical toy a "steam engine" is comparable to calling your walkman -- no, your cd-player -- a Cray supercomputer because both contain silicon-based circuitry.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
See Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind for a counterargument.
-- Kris
You sound like you hold the same viewpoint as Roger Penrose, famed mathematician and author of The Emperor's New Mind (which is probably a lot better than this book). Nonetheless, quantum computing offers an answer to all your criticisms of computers as conscious machines.
Quantum computing introduces true randomness, non-determinacy, and other strange things into computing. It's hard to imagine how it it would not be possible to build a conscious quantum computer (theoretically, that is).
I would bet most of the people who Jon Katz is talking about are rather naive when it comes to anything about computers, not just the limits of their capability.
---
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
The brain is quite predictable on the micro-scale. It is a complex, large, massively parallel, but ultimately deterministic system. It definitely could be simulated and predicted on a UTM. In fact, a UTM could simulate the interactions of several brains.
It never ceases to amaze me how deeply ignorant and arrogant run-of-the-mill so-called computer scientists are.
And it never cease to amaze me the lengths to which non-CS people will go to keep up the obviously-incorrect argument that consciousness is some type of special unique property that only human beings are capable of exhibiting.
A girlfriend would do you good.
Slashdot First Post Compensation Commission
He rates the classic VAX 11/780, generally considered to be a 1 MIPS machine, at 6x10^7 bits/second. So supposedly a top of the line desktop today, about 1500 times the power of the old VAX, is comparable to a mouse. A 1000-machine cluster should reach human power.
But we're not even close.
how about calling your Powermac G4 a supercomputer? sorry, couldn't resist...
Well, some would argue that people are also just automata .... that humans are so complex, and have such a complex web of influences and forces, that the human mind cannot reliably predict what another human may do. ...we are predictable, just not to any intellect we have yet spwaned or encountered.
Ok, so how a car works is magical, mysterious, even random and unpredictable to a child who hasn't studied physics or mechanical engineering yet, certainly. But to say human intelligence IS a predictable automa to a HIGHER intelligence just postpones the problem. Is the not yet spawned or encounterd HIGHER intelligence itself a computer simulatable automa or not? Can IT be comprehended and understood, modeled and computable by an even greater intelligence??
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The issue is that humans are so complex, and have such a complex web of influences and forces, that the human mind cannot reliably predict what another human may do.
:-)
Also... isn't that an infinitely recursive problem? The greatest problem is "finding someone's state" without affecting them in any way (Uncertainty Principle type problem, both at the micro and macro levels). And you also need to remove the simulation itself from having any effect on the world you are simulating...
Something reminding me of Asimov's "Foundation" - basically you need to say, "Yes, I know the future... no, I can't tell you. I figured out what would happen if I only told you I knew... so if I told you what would happen, it might not happen any more..."
As for creativity and inspiration... I can't say if we even CAN "know" that the brain is deterministic, given the above problems, but mistaking complexity for insolvability based on "feelings" about the matter would be foolish (and extremely human
sig fault
Admittedly, I *just* started working with DNA computation about a week ago. Please correct me if I'm missing something.
For instance, I'm free to go out to lunch or stay here and read this fascinating and enlightening discussion, and I choose to...
Go eat!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Human brains are complex biological turing machines.
If you do not believe that the smallest component of the human brain follows some logic (which a computer could replicate), then you must believe that there is some other magic involved.
And if you believe in evolution, but do not believe in eventual computer intelligence, you are even more silly. Because then you believe that nature can randomly create an intelligent machine, but thinking beings (assisted by machines and randomness) cannot. ??
The question to Multivac (and its incarnations throughout Time) was (moreorless) "How to stop the eventual heat death of the Universe."
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
Problems unsolvable by computers roughly fall into three categories:
1. Mathematically proven impossible
The Halting Problem and similar. These are inherently impossible to solve exactly or exhaustively. Note that this impossibility applies regardless of whether the entity tackling the problem is carbon-based or silicon-based.
2. Theoretically possible (exact algorithm is known), but time-/space-consuming.
The Traveling Salesman and his friends in NP. The jury is still out on whether their intractability is a human limitation (i.e. we just haven't managed to come up with a working algorithm in P) or whether they're really that hard, but if the latter is true, then again they're hard to solve exactly for anyone, not just computers.
3. Things involving creativity, feelings, "true understanding", etc.
A suprising number of technically knowledgeable people are willing to grant that one without further questioning, and that's understandable. After all, one can't quite imagine what an algorithm for coming up with a new idea or a subroutine for falling in love would look like, and yet humans are able to DO these things, and they're easy.
So why is it hard to teach a machine to do that? Well, look at it from a different angle: how hard is it to teach a human to do that? Have you ever tried to explain what exactly "being in love" is? The best we've come up with so far in that area is art, music, poetry, which seems to evoke similar feelings in different people, but that's by no means fail-safe. So, from a not too unlikely point of view, humans can't do these things either - we don't know how to do them. They do us instead. Machines might suffer from the same shortcoming, but given the state of our knowledge about this area of human behaviour, we're not even in a position to find out yet.
But then again, maybe the author of the book reviewed here has found a way...
Computers are probably going to continue to increase in computational power until they exceed the abilities of the human brain. They definitely are going to be involved in solving quite a few of the problems that we have now, yes. I dunno who was saying that this meant all the worlds problems would be solved and history would be over.
While you are right that Heron's steam Aeolipile would not have been capable of much power, what IS amazing is the fact that the ancient Greeks had all the essentials for a true steam engine, but didn't take the route of combining the elements to create such a machine.
The knew of valves and pistons - Heron even had an automatic temple door system that relied on air pressure drawing up water to activate the doors to open when a fire was burned on an alter nearby. Other uses were various automata for stage plays and productions, and for various waterworks (fountains and such).
The truth of the matter probably revolves around the fact that they didn't need such machines - there isn't much practical benefit of a machine that only somewhat works, when slaves are much, much cheaper (and in plentiful supply)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I'm not 100% against animal testing, and I'd rather things were tested on some rabbit before it gets to human testing, but, at the same time, most of the animal testing industry needs several hob-nailed boots to the head to correct it.
Yeah. PETA goes a little too far; animal testing is a necessary evil. And I think most rational people see it as that.
Though, perhaps if the PETA people would like to volunteer to spare a few guinea pigs...?
Nope, didn't see any mad rush to the research labs for *that* one.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
There are two famous books by the phenomenologist philosopher Hubert Dreyfus on the folly of Artificial Intelligence.
"What Computers Can't Do: A Critiqe of Artificial Reason"
"What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critiqe of Artificial Reason"
AI folks hate these books for many reasons, but especially because Dreyfus is a technical doofus. He consistently misunderstands what computation is, how computers are programmed, etc. (Sometimes with comical results -- there's a great story in Levy's "Hackers" about Dreyfus claiming (in the 1960s) that no computer would ever play decent chess and then being soundly defeated by a primitive chess-playing program shortly thereafter.)
It's pretty clear that the title of Harel's book ("What Computers Really Can't Do") plays on the titles of Dreyfus's books, reasoning soundly about the formal limits of computation rather than insinuating rhetorically about what computation cannot be based on a particular philosophical (phenomenological) critique.
Either the smallest component of the brain can be broken down to some logic (that can be replicated on a computer). Or there is some magic involved.
And if you believe in evolution, wouldn't you think if nature can randomly create intelligence, that we could do the same with the assistence of our machines and randomness?
10 dis-proofs... or less: (all of these are greatly simplified as I don't want to reread 20+ books)
A) "As far as I can see" == perceptual limitation variable: You as an information bearing automaton have a finite (or fixed infinite) amount of storage and processing power. Most of this is being used to run yourself. Thus you physically cannot have enough resources left over to wholly concieve of another of your class.
B) Indistinguishability != the same. A sphere filled with water and a sphere filled with gasoline may be indistingquishable in the dark, but they are not the same. Do not confuse a limitation of perceptional accuaty and comparibility with equating. You will have several million twins, triplets, etc. P.O.ed.
C) Unsubstatiniated "Apparently" : please list source for this external verification.
D) As for "a very large deterministic system in a chaotic environment" It falls when you point out two things. The deterministic system must itself be a "chaotic environment" as the individual is always a piece of its environment. "To obsever is to influence, and to be influenced" Professor Klemke. Second, I admit I didn't read all the book and BSed on the test.
E) A far better model of "consciousness" is the imaginary numbers models. Just as in the real world the sqaure root of -1 pops up, mathematics leaves open the door to an infinite number of these imaginary numbers. You can thus say JonKatz internal universe, consciousness, runs on sqrt(1), sqrt(-1), and sqrt(JohnKatz). Sqrt(JonKatz) being a number that doesn't exist in the real universe, can't even be manipulated therein. This thus gives an easy test for "consciousness", does this system provably contain a mathmatics that doesn't exist in the real world? Easy test, very, very hard to prove.
F) My favorite, Yes, I will emphatically, and catagorically make the blanket statement that the human mind can't be emulated by a deterministic machine. The only device created thus far to emulate a human mind is the universe, and as you've already said that's a chaotic environment. It can be shown that as the limit of the accuracy of the emulation approaches == the mind it is emulating, the complexity of the system == universe. This does take an exhaustive proof. Proof that an single, isolated bit can not encode more information than a bit. Proof that an un-isolated system can not be emulated, you just have to keep moving out the boundaries till you get an isolated system. Proof that you would need all the information in the universe to run the system.
So yes, there is a system for emulating a mind, the universe. No, you've already defined the universe as a chaotic environment, not a deterministic system.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
Though Penrose would probably agree that a 'quantumgravitational' computer would be able to do it though.
Simply said, Penrose is sceptic about computers ability to mimick a brain as they lack some form of mystical element (as has been proposed by countless philosophers in the past). His particular mystical element needs some improvements in physics: the link between gravitational theory and quantum theory. As to why? Noone (including Penrose) seems to be able to explain.
Please, tell us precicely and in complete detail, one thing that it can't do.
Now, write a computer program doing precisly the actions you just detailed.
Computatbility problems are covered in Automata courses. So, the findings of this book don't sound novel at all. The question is not whether there are problems computers can't solve but which problems can't they solve. This seems as basic an idea to me as the laws of thermodynamics.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
2. To discourage futility. Computer experts who tackle problems that are simply insoluble need to stop wasting their time Pardon? If all endeavours considered futile at the time had been abandoned throughout the span of human history, there would likely be no computers for us to debate about. There would be no excursions to Mars, no walks on the moon, no flying in airplanes, no trips around the globe... Even in the errands of futility there is knowledge to be gleened in failure.
I've always thought that computer simulations would be an effective alternative to the wasteful practice of dissection in high school and intro college classes. While there are certainly new areas to be discovered in biology, they are not going to be discovered in these classes. While you would not be eliminating animal testing, you would be substantially reducing it. Similarly, for most purposes (ie cosmetic testing) a computer model doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough to give a rough idea of the effects of a particular compound. I think that we have a moral obligation to reduce the amount of suffering we cause to creatures capable of feeling pain, which I take to be those creatures with a central nervous system. This is why I don't eat meat - since I don't need to in order to survive why should I cause uneccessary suffering?
I wish I hadn't commented in this story already, this is definately +5 Insightful.
Two is not equal to three, not even for very large values of two.
I read only a small fraction of Pennrose before deciding that he was a bigot. There is no intellectually honest reason to invoke wierd physics to explain the operations of the human brain.
First off, we know very little about the brain - for all we know memory is a quantum-based feature, in which case we might find that things appear to be deterministic, but are truly unpredicatble. So you might simulate the brain without being able to predict very much reliably. This would still be a massive acheivement and I think we will see it within a few generations.
But suppose that the brain can be reduced to a complete mechanistic model. Suppose you go further and identify some quality of the matrix of electrical impulses which signifies the presence of consciousness - however you define it. In reality, you haven't explained squat, because there is nothing in your explanation that requires actual consciousness. You haven't explained why I think I exist, why I perceive. Your only way out of this mess is to reduce consciousness to a bunch of features that don't require the thing we all "think of" as consciouness. Your only way out is to reduce the interesting thing out of the equation, which is useful and will produce many useful scientific results and insights, but is really cheating as far as the topic of discussion is concerned.
This is not any kind of mumbo-jumbo at all. A rational being must accept either that everything is conscious, and we simply exhibit certain forms of it and name those things "intelligence", or that you are forever stuck in some horrible nightmare where you - and even the nightmare - don't exist. You can, of course, retreat into some 18th century ghost-in-the-machine incoherence, which is what most people do. Wake up, if you can.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
What I wanted to known was whether the book covers anything new, something not already covered in a good undergraduate course in theory of computing.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
The average human brain contains 100 billion neurons each of which have about 10 thousand synapses. How can you even COMPARE that to a binary computer? /me doubts your authenticity
http://www.csuchico.edu/psy/BioPsych/neurotransmis sion.html
You should check out this book by Hubert L. Dreyfus: "What computers still can't do" a followup to his original "What computers can't do" My copy is put out by The MIT Press. ISBN: 0-262-54067-3
Enough Katz bashing: he doesn't know much about mathematics -- deal with it. This book is really along the lines of a brief look and popular introduction of computability and computational complexity theory targeted towards those who do not study this area. It is no particular lie to say that quite a few developers and technophiles are not very knowledgeable in the field of computer science nor proficient with NP problems. Software engineering and computer science are two very distinct fields, not neccessarily overlapping. That being said, the general mass of population has even less knowledge of the limitations of computing. When's the last time you heard order of complexity or NP completeness discussed when arguing the future of computing? How many people in the world know who Kurt Gödel is or how to determine undecidability? The answer is not all that many, but one cannot expect the everyone to have knowledge of computability and or computation complexity theory no matter how trivial. If you already have a solid grasp of the fundamentals NP and NP-completeness, know the Church-Turing Hypothesis along with what undecidable and intractable problems are, then you would be best off reading a much more detailed book than this. Computability theory, which discusses effectively unsolveable intractable problems, and computational complexity theory, which discusses solvable intractable problems, both have existed for quite awhile now; this book just introduces some arguments to layman. I guess the point of the book is to educate those who believe the in the all knowing, all powerfull computer god of some of the fundamental limitations of contemporary computing. Sure, if someone went off and made a computational system so radical that it defied the Church-Turing Hypothesis, then our perspective on some computability and complexity problems may change. Quantum computers will shift computability a bit if they ever become feasible, but that isn't anything new. Arguing piece meal points of what computers can and cannot do without mathematical thought is just an unequalified statement without significant substance. Where the sciences and arts prove by exhaustion mathematics proves through rigorous analysis. That is to say mathematicians observe and study the results of formal logic and systems they create rather than observing an external continuum for truth. When it has been correctly proven that a problem is unsolveable then it is unsolveable unless our fundamental understanding of mathematics is incorrect. This is a question I'll leave to the reader and those who study number, set theory and topology. (I thought all CS majors everywhere had to take at least one computability course btw).
When I said a computer was a FSM rather than a TM, I was not considering using removeable storage. One might prove the combination of the computer, the human, and an unbounded supply of floppies to be equivalent to a TM.
However, it is not at all clear that the universe would allow an unbounded supply of floppies. If the universe is finite, and if there is a finite limit to information storage density, then there is a practical bound on the length of a TM tape that can be built.
If you can't build or simulate a tape that can really grow to any arbitrary length, then you can't solve all problems solvable by a TM. In fact, you can't even pose all problems solvable by a TM, because that also requires unbounded storage.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
let rec f x = (f x)
Perhaps you are confusing with Charity in which all programs terminate?
The best book on this subject IMO is The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose. It came out a few years ago. It is basically a critique of AI, but to get there he discusses the theory of computing, Godels Incompleteness theorem, Quantum Mechanics and much much more. The aim of the book is to argue that there are certain things a human mind can do that a computer can never do. Roger Penrose is himself a top mathematician and although the book is aimed at the general public it's not for the faint hearted. Having said that though it is simply stunning, it is a tour of all the major scientific ideas of the last century, and is incredibly stimulating. If you want to read a book on the subject, read this one.
ask questions
No one posits the kind of magical, unknowable qualities to which you object to plain old matter, but that doesn't make it any more knowable.
Matter seems to keep playing this nested russian-doll trick with us. First it's four elements, or five, then 108, then it's just three magic sub-atomic particles, then it's over a hundred again, then it's just a few quarks... Ad infinitum, no doubt, and we'll never get a really good answer to "what is the universe made of," because to answer the question in the way that is being asked is impossible, and we have no reference point for the answer.
We seem to be good at finding the shapes and forms, but we're not playing with the right toolkit - if indeed there is one - for finding some ultimate, irreducible "stuff" that can be rigorously studied and is the "ultimate reality" of anything, be it matter or consciousness.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
The set of languages that can be accepted by a FSM is the set of "regular languages." The set of languages that can be accepted by a TM is the set of "recursively enumerable" languages. The second is a strict superset of the first.
Theoretically, you can solve more problems with unbounded storage than without. Of course, practically, for a given problem, if the finite storage is big enough...
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Here's one thing computers *can't* do:
Shorten the work week.
Technology was initially embraced because, allegedly, it would give us more leisure time. Popular Mechanics magazine has made some of the funniest wrong predictions over the years. One of my favorites was that in 1950, they said that by the year 2000, we'd all be working only 2 days a week, and machines would take the drudgery out of menial tasks by simply eliminating our need to do them.
Of course, that hasn't happened: if anything, the reverse is true.
An ex-neighbor of mine has an interesting collection: he collects lawn mowers. So, he's got a gadget called "The Lawn Ranger". It's a late-1980s computer controlled lawnmower that uses optical sensors to figure out where it has and hasn't already cut. You put it in the middle of your lawn, press the start button, and it goes merrily along, destroying your garden hose, the toys that the kids left in the lawn, and generally wreaking havoc. It's cool, and the task of mowing the lawn is pretty braindead, but it's hard for the computer to grasp it.
He's also got a far more practical device called a Hovermower. It has no wheels, and uses a fan built onto the blades to hover above the lawn like a hovercraft. It, too, is great: sweep it around corners. But, like the Lawn Ranger, it's not a very good idea: when it runs out of gas, as the motor slows down, it ceases to produce enough lift, and the blades end up tearing up a big chunk of sodding. And you don't want to ever leave the thing idling unattended, as it has a tendency to slide around like a puck on a crooked air hockey table.
Technology, and all associated good ideas, have their limits.
Sure, we're more productive during our working ours because of technology. And it's given society a whole lot *more* career choices than before, when you could basically either be a farmer or a burden to your family.
Computers are merely an incremental step along the path away from a one-lifestyle existance, whereever that path may lead. They simply join the ranks of everything starting from the steam engine and Jaquard's Loom all the way to the modern transportation infrastructure and the fax machine.
Cars can't do everything.Nope. But they've freed us from the shackles of public transportation, allowed us to independently venture further than the first town down the road, and given us the ability to be more productive in the workplace. And, in doing so, they entertain us and diversify the working world.
This is prolly a good book and all but get real people, computers are just tools and the audience this book was intended for knows this.Agreed. But I'd wager there are some reading this discussion right now to whom computers are *everything*; while that's not necessarily wrong if your work and hobbies involve nothing else, but it's a very narrow (ie. wrong) view of the big picture.
Computers are cool toys. And then when you've got valuable information spinning around at 7,200 RPM on your hard disks, then they're very important tools.
A slot screwdriver can be used for turning screws. Or, it can be used as a pry-bar (I have a big one that my buddies and I call "The Persuader"). Or a chisel. Or as a weapon. Even as a fireplace poker. They're a very versatile tool.
A computer is simply a very versatile tool: They're the 21st century screwdriver.
And that is a rational perspective.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Computers can be used for spell check though:
No entry found for "reknowned" in the dictionary.
Maybe Mr. Katz could use his computer for something that we know it is good for before lecturing us (albeit poorly) about a book with a main topic that deals with what computers *aren't* good for.
Jon Katz is an idiot
One other thing is that most animal testing is not beneficial - more cosmetics and such than anything else.
I agree. Is it really necessary to test eyeliner on rabbits?
However, animal testing of potentially life-saving drugs, techniques and procedures, I'm all for. As long as, again, it's well planned, and viewed in the light of the necessary evil that it is.
We have a large criminal population who will never do any good for society. This would be an excellent pay back.Yeah, even Hitler had a good idea from time to time. Though, I suspect, that the thought of being a guinea pig and potentially used in really nasty experiments would be a very strong deterrent to the criminal population. However, it goes completely against the existing standards regarding cruel and unusual punishment. That's a slippery slope to start going down.
Perhaps an agreement to be used in testing for a reduced sentence?
One might argue that giving a convicted bank robber 10 years off his prison term when he gets the placebo is unfair; I'd argue that the coin could have landed either way and he could just as easily have been the guy getting ten years off his sentence for some really nasty experimentally-induced neurological disorder.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
It's called experience, and experience - like the Turing tape that invariably gets discussed in articles like this one - is unbounded. At the least, humans are an extremely complex combination of both biology and experience. Experience and biology being what they are, it's very difficult to rule out that they might be the only influences on human growth and change.
You don't have to remove any of the wonder or mysticism from your work or your perception of life to accept any of this: it's still pretty fcking incredible, and worthy of great respect.
[|]
... is whether we can determine whether John Katz brain will ever stop churing out these worthless articles.
Computability was discussed to death years ago in Roger Penrose's "The Emporer's new mind".
IMO until we know in far greater detail how the brain works, then claims as to whether the brain achieves non-computable things are useless. Penrose's whole argument was based on quantum level computations taking place in the nanotubes of the glia, rather than at a neural net or higher level. Hardly a mainstream view.
Well, I disagree. There is a big difference between humanely raising and killing animals for food, and subjecting them to torture. The old "you can't be against animal testing if you aren't a vegan" argument is not logical. I make this comment with the full knowledge that the meat industry is not always the most humane thing going, but the principle stands.
Computational complexity or not, there are ways that problems can be solved in more efficient ways. Wasn't it in recent history that is was said that modems would never get above 2400, 14.4k, 28.8k, etc? Then someone came along and figured out a way to encode multiple bits into a baud and that "never" was, uh, wrong.
This is an important point!!
yours,
yours,
kbs
The 2nd word in this article is spelled wrong. The 2nd one!
"renowned"
Um...yeah. That's what I want...a criminal turned into a headcase let out ten years early. Hide the children!
Please read The Human Use of Human Beings. I'm pretty sure this is all covered there if you read closely.
There are mechanical problems that are hard to do. They're called "Hard Problems" - one way or nearly one way algorithms that plausibly could be solved given enough time.
There are math problems that don't lend themselves to discrete mathematics. I'm not sure a computer would have help Georg Cantor develop set theory. Also there are certain problems that lend themselves well to approximation but not an exact solution. If I dust off my solid analytic geometry books I'm sure I can find a few. That or real time celestial navigation problems using polar calculus.
Then there are all of those problems that don't lend themselves to computation at all. Knowledge and insight come from the synthesis of new ideas out of different, multiple sources. So for example the sharpest mining bit in the universe doesn't by itself help you to understand the chemistry of the Earth's crust.
Either Harel or Katz is apparently living in some 1950s-era science fiction movie in which computers are mysterious, all-powerful, poorly understood devices. Because anyone who actually uses a computer for any length of time will be quickly disabused of any notion that they can do "almost anything that we can think up". And anyone with a CS degree will be familiar with the concept of NP-completeness and will therefore have a solid basis for having abandoned anything like the magical, worshipful view that Katz suggests here.
If Katz is reporting accurately here, I have to wonder what planet Harel is from where people still think like this. Katz's description makes the book sound like a 'keen grasp of the obvious' sort of tome.
We now know that not all algorithmic problems are solvable by computers, even with unlimited access to resources like time and memory space.
Excuse me? We now know this? Get serious. NP completeness is not a new idea. We've known this for a long time now. Either Katz or Harel is way off here in suggesting that this is some kind of recent discovery.
The limitless potential power of computing has all kinds of implications for technology, education, culture and politics.
Psst... Katz... You just said that this book demonstrates that computers are limited in what they can do. Now they're limitless? Please make up your mind...
--
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
Is there anyone with a CS degree who didn't learn about complexity and O notation running time order proofs? Here at Waterloo, it's introduced in first year.
I agree that many "details" are unknown. But many of these details are at higher orders of abstraction than the molecular level (which, I assume, any useful computer simulation would need to simulate at).
Interesting factoid: When 2001 originally came out, IBM paid for every employee to go see it, to get a vision of the great future of computing that their company (and others, of course) were working toward.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
In most societies in history there was no chance of enforcing non-slavery. But there was always the chance of abolishing slavery as soon as possible. And it happened. So of course we should fight against the even more cruel things going on now.
And even if you can't get it ALL to stop RIGHT NOW it of course helps not to pay for production using slaves, human or not.
Now, irrational numbers are another ball of wax... how many digits of pi do you feel like computing/storing? :-)
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I have to say that, based on this review, I can't imagine purchasing the book. Knowing Harel's reputation leads me to believe that the review is flawed.
Questions about the theoretical limits of computing are governed by three theses. The Church-Turing-Tarski Thesis says that the computer on your desktop is roughly as powerful as any computer anyone could ever build.
The Polytime Thesis attempts to clarify ``roughly'' in the previous sentence. It claims that anything that can be done in polytime can be done in low-order polytime; to oversimplify, that things that are possible for a very powerful computer should be possible for yours if you're willing to wait just a little longer.
The third thesis is that "P is not equal to NP". Again very simplistically, this says that ``guessing right is lucky'': You cannot build a computer which solves problems quickly by always guessing right and then checking the guesses to be sure.
Without turning all three theses into theorems, the limits of computability remain fuzzy. Many, perhaps most, practically interesting computational problems appear to be NP-complete, and we are not yet certain whether these problems are inherently tractable.
As I said before, I'm sure Harel understands all this. Perhaps I'll try to browse a copy of his book at the local bookstore, and see what he really says.
"Free will that is not random and independent of the will of its maker"?
What is that exactly?
Free will IS a random-want/thought creating mechanism. What else would it be? How could you define it?
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
--Pablo Picasso
I'd personally take issue with the 'useless' part of that, but on the whole, it's a rather important point.
The quantity of neurons and synapses is entirely irrelevant. Assuming it is deterministic in some way is all you need to run a simulation of the whole thing on a turing machine. I know this may strike you as ridiculous, but it's as true.
I never said the brain is a universal turing machine. I said it's reducible to a turing machine, all this requires is determinism.
Yes I realize this determinism is an assumption and I should have stated it as such, but it's one I take for granted because I have yet to see evidence of anything in the mind that is not entirely reducible to the interactions of molecules or electrotonic forces.
Consider the possibility that I'm not quite as ignorant as you assume.
> What I personally feel doesn't come in to it. There is no point arguing for a law if it will never get voted in or be enforced.
Bollocks, arguing for a law is always worth it if it is something you believe in. Even if the law doesn't pass you may convince people of your point of view.
In the case of vivisection, maybe you'll convince some people to boycott companies who support the practice. It may not make a huge difference, but if that is the case why bother doing anything.
Do you think that when black slaves first started trying to gain their freedom that there was much chance of a change to the status quo?
Your attitude seems to be, "If anything is too difficult, just give up."
A) You as an information bearing automaton have a finite (or fixed infinite) amount of storage and processing power. Most of this is being used to run yourself. Thus you physically cannot have enough resources left over to wholly concieve of another of your class.
Um, so what?
Not only does this contribute nothing to the debate, but it's also true for any other object or system (deterministic or not).
B) Indistinguishability != the same.
Then how do you prove that your model of the human mind (a "conscious", nondeterministic system) is better than mine? For either of us, we can only compare the predictions of our models to actual observations. If our predicted behaviour is indistinguishable from actual behavior, we assume that our model is a working one (note that many different models may work).
Apparently nondeterministic actions are adequately explained by strong sensitivity to input and the chaotic, effectively unpredictable nature of this input.
C) Unsubstatiniated "Apparently" : please list source for this external verification.
You seem to be confused by my perhaps-unclear statement above. A clearer version is: "Actions that appear to be nondeterministic are adequately explained as being the results of a deterministic system interacting with input that is chaotic and thus effectively unpredictable."
This is self-evident. If you feed something random into a deterministic system, of course you'll get random-looking data out. This is my point; nondeterministic actions do not require a nondeterministic mind.
D) As for "a very large deterministic system in a chaotic environment" It falls when you point out two things. The deterministic system must itself be a "chaotic environment" as the individual is always a piece of its environment.
The system itself doesn't need to be chaotic to give chaotic output when given chaotic input. It may very well be chaotic; this is a very different thing from being nondeterministic. Either way, my point holds, so I don't really see what you're getting at here.
"To obsever is to influence, and to be influenced" Professor Klemke.
Again, so what?
E) A far better model of "consciousness" is the imaginary numbers models.
[...]
This example is vague enough that it is difficult to tell what, if anything, it contributes to the argument. However, I'll take a shot at the two points I did manage to find in it:
Short answer: No. You've just defined extra symbols for your own mathematical system. There are actually an inifinite or near-infinite number of possible mathematical systems. Talking about whether a given symbol in the system, like "sqrt(-1)" or "sqrt(JonKatx)", exists in the "real world" is not meaningful. The number "5" doesn't exist in the real world - it's just an idea that we choose to associate with certain structuring in the world about us. The manipulation of such symbolic "ideas", under *any* mathematical system, can be performed deterministically. Thus, this example doesn't seem to affect my argument much.
Firstly, this entire example seems to stem from some questionable hand-waving, as mentioned above. Secondly, you've already *claimed* to prove that the human mind is non-deterministic. I'm challenging you to provide support for this proof.
The only device created thus far to emulate a human mind is the universe, and as you've already said that's a chaotic environment.
This scores a big "so what?" on two counts.
Firstly, chaos can easily occur in *deterministic* systems. Look up "chaos".
Secondly, the only device created thus far that emulates the human mind is the human brain - much smaller than the universe. This also does not constitute a proof by any stretch; you have to prove that emulation by any other method is *not* possible (i.e. disprove the existance of anything other than the human brain which can host something indistinguishable from a human mind).
It can be shown that as the limit of the accuracy of the emulation approaches == the mind it is emulating, the complexity of the system == universe.
Um, no.
The mind has finite complexity, as all of its state information is contained within the human brain. The uncertainty principle and a few other laws place constraints on the amount of information that can be contained in that volume at its measured temperature.
The proof that you are quoting is flawed hand-waving (one of my complaints about The Emperor's New Mind, among other things).
I have defended Katz before, but this time I am not sure who the boy is talking to, or what he is trying to say. I have had to deal with people who assume computers can do anything. These people are annoying, especially when they put pressure on you for the "inadequecies" and "laziness" of the entire field of Computer Science!
However, don't programmers continually run into the limitations of their box? Aren't we constantly being creative to get around some roadblock or another? The point made that memory space is not the only limitation we face is very 1980's-ish to me. Back then, AI was going to build the Terminator as soon as we had enough memory.
That was then, this is now. I think the Katz-man misjudged his audience when writing this review. Maybe the book is better than the review it got.
For example, there is some interesting research being done on the limits of quantum computation. Perhaps quantum computers will be able to solve a larger class of problems. That might disprove the Church-Turing-Tarski thesis.
It has been shown that classical computers' PSPACE and quantum computers' PSPACE are equivalent so there isn't a tremendous amount of hope left in this whole QC thing.
People have still found ways to achieve subexponential speedups however with these problems.
And I haven't even mentioned intractability - the gigantic class of problems that we don't know how to solve quickly when the problem gets large. For example, many optimization problems seem easy on paper when you have a set of 2 or 3 objects. You code up a little demo program that can handle 10 to 20 objects. It seems a little slow, but you figure you can optimize it and find a better algorithm, and use a faster computer. Meanwhile Marketing is promising people that you will be able to solve the problem with 1000 objects.
I was under the impression most algorithmics work today is being done in the NP domain. Pretty much 'acceptable' solutions are found for most P problems. CS PhD's are working on ways to make intractable problems tractable. Of course nothing can 'solve' these, but for specific applications there may be solutions that are 'good enough'. So you see many approximate solutions that you can run in subexponential time.
Of course every application has subtle differences in what is acceptable and what is not. This was of course designed by the CS PhD's so that they would never be out of a job.
It would be like trying to find a solution to the equation "n * 0 = 100".
This has solutions for very small values of 100.
PETA == People Eating Taste Animals!! Animals are food and products. Testing prevents human injury and death. you wanna be on the wrong side of a contaminated snickers?
Oh my god, another signiture that makes no sense.
First of all, this quote is a real laugh:
The implication is that the realization that there are things that computers can't do is somehow new or unexpected.In fact, the very first computer science paper ever written (Alan Turing: "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entsheidungsproblem" Proc. London Math. Soc. 42, 230-65, 1937) is about problems that have a definite, mathematical answer, but whose solution by a computer is mathematically, intrinsically impossible.
So, for more than sixty years, a good five or ten years before the first computers were built (depending on whose definition you accept) we already knew about problems that they couldn't solve.
Harel's book is not one of the first books in recent memory that focuses on the limits of computers. Any textbook on the theory of computation concentrates on this. The classic of the field is Computability and Unsolvability by Martin Davis, first published in 1958, which set the standard for how computing theory is taught. If you suffered through a theory course based on Turing Machines, it's Martin's fault. His book gets to its first proof that a problem is uncomputable half way down the third page of the introduction, before Chapter 1 even starts!
The idea that few people, even with advance [sic] computer science degrees understand these problems is laughable. Anybody with an advanced computer science degree from a major institution has sat through a theory course in which undecidable problems are broached within the first few weeks, and an algorithms course in which intractable problems (those that aren't impossible, but for which no feasibly fast algorithm exists) are a major topic.
-Tom Duff
Currently, computers are sort of turing machines.
As their power increases, their "speed" of computation is a multiplication of the previous "generation".
This means, that polynomenial(SP?) problems will not be solved for large cases even with infinite multiplication of such computing power.
But what about new types of computers, which will increase their power polynomenially with every generation? (Some type of futuristic quantom computer, or DNA computer?) (A computer that solves polynomenial problems [of a complexity of Constant^n] with larger and larger n's, just as current computers solve problems of O(n) complexity with larger and larger n's)
Those might make it feasible to solve problems currently regarded as infinite-time problems.
I'm not sure about infinite memory, but it seems quantom computer can represent 2^x bit-states with just x Qubits.
Who knows what other forms of "Computing" we will find in the future?
No, I would disagree with that. It might be possible to approximate a brain with a turing machine, but that might not be good enough.
I'm not saying we will never have AI, or anything like that - I just don't believe it will be on a digital computer. I'd suspect that the hardware for developing an artificial intelligence will end up having many of the same features as a biological brain.
--
Clear, Dark Skies
Ideas come from outside the human mind? Gee, and you still get visits from Santa, too, right?
All such racists I've ever discussed are either idiot followers who have never really talked to a Jew or black person in their lives, or idiots with an IQ of around 70 and less.
Which one are you?
Yeah, but by the time it solved the problem, it was too late.
Of course, the solution solved that problem too...
--
Clear, Dark Skies
"A slot screwdriver can be ... used as a pry-bar (I have a big one that my buddies and I call "The Persuader"). Or a chisel. Or as a weapon. Even as a fireplace poker."
;)
heathen.
its because of people like you that i have to lock my toolchest. j/k
Whether I agree with you or not, your logical conclusion doesn't follow from your starting assumption. Your declaration states that all animals and humans with microcephaly/retardation are equals, without giving any basis for that assumption. Take another swing.
Virg
a car is a tool, and so is a computer.
both man made, both designed to do different things.
transport ppl, move matter, power things etc.
automobiles/combustion engines are just as flexible in there use as computers.
Apples == oranges.
An apple is a fruit, and so is an orange.
Both grow naturally, and both taste different.
One's citric and tart, the other is sugary and sweet, etc.
Apples can be prepared just as many ways as oranges.
Just because two things are comparable along a strictly limited range of criteria does not make them the same thing. Cars are not the same things as computers, and knowing about the theoretic properties of one does not teach you much about the other.
but after the thing dow chemical (or was it some paint company?) did with genetic algorithms, i'm not so sure.
early nineties: it was getting more and more difficult to make paint. volatility and lead laws, customer demand for particular qualities (glossy, long lived) etc. were driving chemists nuts. drop volitility, get short lived/fugly paint. they were having some luck, but not much.
the scientists brought in a consulting company to see what could be done with genetic algorithms. after some months of design and encoding of the basic chemical makeup and physical properties of paint, they were stunned that, after a few days processing, the algorithms cranked out several formulas that far exceeded all legal and usability requirements.
it was estimated that the labs, using traditional processes, would have taken 100+ years to develop these formulas.
i'm not so sure that you could not take some non-deterministic physical process and use it to drive genetic or neurofuzzy algorithms and blow all the NP stuff out of the water at some point.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
... what is an isn't possible? "2. To discourage futility. Computer experts who tackle problems that are simply insoluble need to stop wasting their time" Things are only insoluble until their solved. Years of human history should've taught us that by now. "4. To make possible the otherwise impossible." Doesn't this conflict with point two? Granted, their are things that aren't possible with our current way of processing problems and looking at things logically, but there's no law saying we can't re-invent the basic way we represent information. Who's to say what's impossible? Years ago flight was impossible, so was long-distance communication. People who tried to make them happen were ridiculed, and now we take them for granted. Don't underestimate human ingenuity.
Oh, yeah? Well, up yours! :)
Virg
P.S. Sorry, I couldn't resist this one. I agree that professionalism and professional experience don't necessarily go hand in hand. However, I disagree with you in that I think they often do. If you didn't wish to imply condescension, take my comment as the joke that it is. If you did wish to imply condescension, take my comment at the joke that it is, but assume tongue-in-cheek.
There is no point arguing for a law if it will never get voted in or be enforced.
Well, this seems to be a vote for pragmatism over ideals.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
> "they ground us into reality"
But I don't want to be ground into reality. Personally, I don't want to be ground into anything.
Virg
It is difficult for me to understand how somebody could build a simulator with enough transistors to create a turing machine large enough to simulate a human brain, when according to Carl Sagan this is a number greater than the number of elementary particles (protons and electrons) in the known universe. I understand that brain is running at a slow frequency, but still, it would take several galaxies worth of matter just to build anything close, using binary architectures. (today's 32/64-bit CPU's are laughable by comparison) Anyone who has been a computer scientist and a neuroscientist should have this insight. Real breakthroughs in CPU architectures are awaiting those who can mimic the brain.
You've sidestepped an important point in the question of hypocrisy: eating meat is, in essence, killing an animal purely for the pleasure of the taste of animal flesh. Never mind the environmental consequences of beef cattle (both inherent to raising the number we do, and flaws in the system that are not inherent but motivated by profit concerns.)
OTOH, using animals for medical testing often answers questions that simply cannot be answered without involving some animal (though one could experiment directly on homo sapiens, but current ethics seems to find that a lab rat's life is of less value than a human life, but let's not sidestep into that gray area).
So, in essence, to be non-vegetarian and to oppose medical testing with animals is to say that the death of animals for pleasure is okay, but the possible death and/or suffering of animals for the advancement of medical knowledge (which will benefit both veterinary science as well as human medical science) is not okay.
Something to think about, anyway.
(As it happens, I am a vegetarian who doesn't purchase leather or other animal-death products, except for cat food because cats do -not-, biologically, have the option of being vegetarian even if their owner is, and yet I support animal use in medical testing, not without some ambivalence, but it is, at present, the best option; in the future, other options may arise, ie, using cloning technology to develop individual organs to experiment on without needing a living animal, or even computer simulations once we know enough to simulate usefully, though I doubt such technologies will ever completely replace live testing, they may well result in far fewer deaths and less suffering by filtering out less promising technologies early...
I also somewhat agree with the claim that being against medical testing without being an ethical vegetarian is hypocritical, though I can see the potential for non-hypocritical philosophies that resolve the contradictions, even if I wouldn't, personally, agree with them; I think, though, that many people simply don't ask the questions and formulate their personal opinions on vague feelings and the effectiveness of propaganda directed at them... but then, that's true on every issue.)
Parity Even
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
And we all get the privilege of witnessing Katz's excruciatingly slow education. Someone should pay for him to go do CS at MIT or something. The way he's going, he should discover LISP by 2021.
... who wants to talk to you about vacuum cleaners.
(Word to the humor-impaired: the Traveling Salesman problem has been proven NP-complete, which means it can only be solved by a deterministic Turing machine if P=NP. Nobody's proven any relation yet between P and NP, but it's widely believed P!=NP, which means no deterministic Turing machine will ever be able to solve the Traveling Salesman problem.
In other words, my comment of "there's a Traveling Salesman who wants to talk to you about vacuum cleaners" is a carefully-worded flame. Translated, "it's good that you got out of computer science, because, buddy, you suck if you don't know the intractability of NP problems.)
Hey, wake up! Incomputable doesn't make it insolvable. This book and this post about NP-complete-ness and other things may be true, but there are serious difficulties when applied to the real world.
Computer scientists (like this one) I suspect, often believe that problems can't be solved if they are totally intractable. Now in real-life, though, we have a thing called approximation. As a computational biologist, I almost always make many approximations that when applied to the correct answer - work well, and rather quickly!
Your reply was insulting and condescending to the original poster. As a computer scientist solving real problems I think you should read a little about solving problems in real life, not just in silico.
Only an intellectually dishonest person would claim that there is no dependance between the physical and mental. The various criteria that would cause you to reject that notion would also require you to reject all other physical knowledge, starting with all scientific theories. A little too radical for my blood, sorry.
First off, we know very little about the brain
Actually, we know quite a bit about the brain. For instance, we know that there is no reason at this time to believe that wierd quantum-level physics are in any way the source of its computational abilities.
Your only way out of this mess is to reduce consciousness to a bunch of features that don't require the thing we all "think of" as consciouness.
The most popular (and correct, IMHO) objection to your argument is that the way we intuitively "think of" consciousness is just plain wrong. Just as our intuitions about colors or solid objects allows us to deal with these entities without accurately describing their true physical nature, the words we use to describe our folk psychological notions of consciousness, while functional, are inaccurate and incorrect in regards to what is physically occuring.
You haven't explained why I think I exist, why I perceive.
Yes, I have. That's like saying an account of the stimulation of C-fibers in the nerves of your big toe and your brain's response to this stimulation doesn't explain the pain you feel in your foot.
but is really cheating as far as the topic of discussion is concerned.
Like I just said, you are the one who is cheating if you require the materialist to present a model that adheres to your misguided and illusory subjective experience of "consciousness."
A rational being must accept either that everything is conscious, and we simply exhibit certain forms of it and name those things "intelligence"
Your first error here is a failure to see that "consciousness" is a multivariated quality, not some boolean true-false condition. I am more conscious than a coma patient. My dog is more conscious than a protozoa. A protozoa is more conscious than a rock. So in a sense I will readily admit that a lot of things DO possess consciousness to at least an infinitesimal degree.
How do you know? When have people during the last 50 years in the US been consulted on whether they'd like more leisure time?
The fact is that there is a hierarchical structure of positions, and the people who occupy them get to decide on how much time people should dedicate to work, and how much leisure time they get. Those at the top literally have the power to decide for millions.
Are you adequate?
Can you tell me what polymorphic lambda-calculus is, and where I might find an good introduction to it? It sounds interesting, and I was not aware that there is another calculus besides the one you learn in math class.
Thanks!
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
That introduces a demand for convicts, and a class of very powerful institutions (research institution, pharmaceutical companies) with an vested interest in making the government capture more "criminals" for its experiments.
Actually, China has recently been accused of something very similar. China some years back passed a law allowing for the organs of executed prisoners to be donated against the prisoner and the family's will. The number of executions swelled after that, as the number of foreigners who went to China and paid for organ transplants. The claim essentially is that China started making money out of the organs of executed prisoners, and thus, it started executing more prisoners.
The U.S. courts (I think the Supreme Court, but I'm not sure) actually ruled once against this same thing, the taking of organs from the executed. The nature of the argument was that it would affect the justice system negatively, by introducing an incentive for juries to hand death penalties ("somebody needy will get those organs").
Problems of the same kind hold for your "solution".
Are you adequate?
a person cannot adhere strictly to your "question everything" philosophy and still live their life realisticly. one must make an enormous number of assumptions every day. this is not necessarily a bad thing.
for example, do you test the floor ahead of you before you take a step to make sure that the floor will support you? of course not, it would take too long and is wasted effort. these things go by degrees. if i were looking for survivors in an earthquake damaged building then testing the floor might make sense. you have to play the percentages when appropriate and for the most part one can assume that the ground underfoot is solid.
that being said i think it is important to identify assumptions and test them when appropriate. this often leads to great discoveries and i believe this last part is in alignment with your point of view. assumptions are like blind spots and the trick is identifying the blind spots that haven't been noticed before.
The subject says it all. Pennrose misquotes and misunderstands Godel's Theorem in the first few chapters, and makes it the basis for all of the retarded bunk quantum-mechanics ramblings that appear later in the book. Read it if you want, but don't be suckered into thinking anyone takes his argument seriously.
How many times have you heard that if man were meant to fly, he would have been born with wings? Well he does and he isn't. But if the Wright brothers had taken heed, where would you be living now?
You really have to wonder about books or articles like this. It reminds me of that forward we've all received innumerable times that contains statements made by important people concerning the future that turned out to be utterly wrong. The patent office claiming that everything that could be invented had already been by 1900. Impossibility of flight. No two snowflakes the same. Computers will never catch on. You'll fall off if you try to sail around the world.
Sure, at the present, computers are limited by human capabilities and resources. But why should that prevent people in the future from attempting what seems impossible now?
I certainly would never allow someone to tell me something is impossible just because he can't wrap his brain around it the right way.
I'm really easy to get along with once you people learn to worship me.
Forget about things like simulating life... I still can't find a program to play GO better than my 6 year old nephew.
The flaw in Penrose's reasoning is that simulations may not need to be acurrate to the quantum level. If the brain was that sensative/fine-tuned to the quantum level, then one cup of coffee would result in a human BSOD.
IOW, the tolerances of biology are far higher than the level where Penrose is focusing. Nature is not anal retentive.
Table-ized A.I.
many, many programs are debugged enough to be useful, like the Netscape browser I am using right now.
By "Netscape" you mean a recent release of the Mozilla browser, correct? Netscape 4.x just too buggy for me to work with at least.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Huh? Sure neural nets can have loops, and that is precisely where they do gain state.
Minksy may have been an AI pioneer, but what has he done lately other than ride his own tattered coat-tails? I don't know where I'd even begin to critisize "The Society of Mind" - it doesn't even begin to address the hard problems of AI, and competely ignores the absolutely fundamental problems of perception and representation.
Minsky may pay lip service to connectionism and synthetic approaches, but he comes across to me as a died-in-the-wool symbolic AI adherent, who's work in that field has simply been eclipsed by others usch as Allen Newell and Doug Lenat.
Minsky wants to come across as the "wise old man" of AI, but his essays are no more than tired and masturbatorily self-indulgent fluff pieces.
since everybody like to quote penrose, i'll like to say that i've read Penrose (well not in its entirety with all the nasty bits :) and i do find some contentions with his arguments.
firstly, on the main argument, we should realize that all this breast-beating about limits of computability and halting problems are only in the context of turing machines (TM). yeah yeah all our computers are in that kind of form now, but it doesn't have to be in the future - quantum computers for example, can break these turing machine-hard problems in no time if harnessed.
penrose argument seems to be that our brain could be a complex bit of quantum machinery, and therefore is not subceptible/easy to recreate/copy/emulate thanks to various quantum mechanical properties etc. i find that there are very little evidence to support this -- we just don't know enough to qualify what penrose feels is right. i've also read somewhere that the quantum mechanical states in our brains get messed up during MRI(?) scans, but we don't come out a babbling idiot after it.
i believe that there can be great advances, even further than what we prognosticate to be impossible, if we just look beyond the box of contraints we seem to be put ourselves in. thinking machines are very possible, not because of moore's law of added firepower, but though evolution of our current technologies and assumptions.
There is absolutely no corelation between Moores law and whether something is computable or not. The time domain plays no part in it and neither does whether its apropriate to solve the problem that way.
It depends on your definition of "computable." "Theoretically computable" is a necessary but not sufficient condition for "practically computable." A Turing machine has an unbounded tape; no real computer can match it. If there are more steps in an algorithm than atoms in the known universe, I'd like to see you come up with a successful Go bot.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Slaves...more cruel things???? Are you infering that the use of animals in testings is more cruel than the abuse of human rights and freedoms... I think you're posting to the wrong server.....
--------------------------------- Born Again Bourne Again Believer: New Life, GNU/Linux Be Free!
Not everybody is able to do IT work. In my company, we hire some mentaly deficient people who are great at recycling cardboard but could never use a computer if their life depended on it. You have to understand that the old adage "every one is born equal" is a myth. In the same respect,not everyone has the urge to go forward like you do.
So, we'll bring everyone down to the level of those who have no motivation, no intelligence. Goody. I can't wait. When are where can I report for my lobotomy?
(I'm sure my life will be a lot less stressful.)
Not everyone has the competitive edge.And that's my fault how?
Some people actualy like manual work, getting their hands dirty.I like manual work. A lot of my job involves manual work. Even been in the crankcase of an engine that is 4 stories tall? Ever had to climb to the top of the mast on a Great Lakes bulker to change an EPROM in a radar transceiver?
you might say that these people are weak and that they should be eliminated by natural selection.I might. In fact, I do. It's ironic how those who espouse the most socialist views (countering Darwin) are also those who most fanatically defend Mother Nature, who is about nothing but the survival of the fittest.
Why can't socialists reconcile their beliefs? It undermines your credibility as a group.
(And don't tell me about socialism, trust me: I *live* in a socialist country. And don't tell me you're not a socialist, either - you and Stalin would have been buddies.)
I say they bring us back to earth. they ground us into reality.Well, they ground us, anyway.
IANAAC: I Am Not A Anonymous Coward (i am just too lazy to register)Hmmm... You're not helping your point all that much. Are you also too lazy to show up at work on time?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
you cannot write a program that will tell you if another program will terminate, or run forever. (That works for ALL possible programs and input).
Alternatively, we could rip some codons out of some of Stephen Hawking's DNA and grow some wierd genetically engineered brain in a pan on the desk and hook electrodes up to it.
In a way he is saying we cannot make it do this or that, but seriously, who defines what technology can or can't do?
In their current state we may be able to see a lot of things which we are not capable of doing, but who a hundred years ago knew that we would be using computers to explore Mars or to calculate estimated sizes of the universe. Such things were not even within the comprehension of the average person.
Right now you are at a stage in which only within the last 10 years kids are being born with computers commonly around them.
If this is how far we got with people who have been there since the early stages of modern computing, think how much more smarter and how many more computer type thinkers there will be in another 10 years.
You never know, in 20 years time we may decide that all this technology is fsking us bigtime so we no longer use it!
Human minds are just simple turing machines. This means that everything they do is utterly predictable. The very essence of being conscious is an ability to behave in a random fashion, also known as free will. Human minds will never have free will and will never be conscious, not in their present Turing Machine form, anyway. It is for the best, anyway. I don't want to be superceded mentally and made redundant, like the industrial revolution made my muscles redundant. So I am very glad conscious minds are impossible. It would be dangerous for us if they were.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Where did you get the idea that human minds are not predictable? They are based on very simple, completly determistic, rules. The reason we can't predict them now is beacuse we don't have enough computational power. 30 years from now that won't be the case.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Is not an analogue device, while not digital in the on/off sense, it does use descrete values. (The number of connected neurons that are currently firing determines wether a neuron fires)
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Katz is writing an article to make the book sound interesting. Of course the average slashdot reader won't get all excited about a non-techie book. The average slashdot reader + word skill could probably write the book. To that many of you would probably say, "Then why did he even bother to post?"
It's arguable, but I'm glad he did. Books that explain computers to the rest of the world are important for cultural development. Ten years from now I don't want people still saying about me, "He does computers, he's a genious!" Without books like these, computers will never be commonplace for the common man.
Twenty years later (in 1993) Dreyfus wrote the sequel What Computers Still Can't Do - it's still in print.
Another good book for the philosophical approach to AI is a 1985 collection of essays called The Mind's Eye, edited by Douglass Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. This one includes John Searle's Chinese Room experiment and various other gedankenexperiments intended to explore how we think about how we think.
Also, those interested should look up "complexity theory" to see what mathematicians and computer scientists have to say about the nature of intractable problems.
I play Nerd-Folk!
Uh, yes, absolutely. And not just animals in experiments, the food industry is quite horrible too. How about spending your whole life in a wire cage so small you can't stretch out your limbs? (most hens) Or having your testicles cut out without any kind of anaesthesia? (most male pigs)
Some are saying some racist-like crap about it not being very important because the victims don't belong to the human master-species. (like they do, funny how those advocating special privileges for the master-group-of-the-century always happen to belong to it themselves, isn't it?) But from an individual perspective it most of the time is clearly worse, yes.
Why would an itellegent computer want to compose music, or fall in love? A computer mind would have to deal with a completely different envionment and would strugle for different resources. An intellgent computer would not minic our "most human" activities.
How can you possibly put
:P
"-- attempt to destroy the relationship of a happily engaged couple by offering a prize of millions. "Well, they knew what they were getting in to."
in comparison with the other three items? The other three items creates the dire possibility that if you're poor, the only way that you'll get out of that condition is by risking your life. Someone being poor isn't always (in fact it is often NOT) voluntary. However, being in a relationship, and then attempting to test that relationship is completely voluntary. Yes, they DID know what they were getting into.
I'm going to make the assumption that you're talking about "Temptation island". Being in New Zealand, I don't know exactly how the couples collect the prize, and Fox's high graphics and low content web site didn't explain any of those aspects. I am making the assumption that the couples get the prize money by either remaining faithful to their partner, or by picking the answers that are closest to their partner's when asked what their partner really wants. If they win the prize money by being unfaithful to their partner, there would be MUCH more of an outcry about the program, and there also would be little challenge to those who really wanted the money. In my opinion, there is little challenge to the couples who want to win the money by remaining faithful. I guess you could argue the "Prisoners dillemma", but that implies that there is very little trust between the partners to begin with, which means that the relationship is effectively dead anyways.
My point is, temptation CANNOT destroy a relationship unless one of the partners allows it to. And when one of the partners gives in to temptation, s/he does it of his/her own free will, and it is HIS/HER fault, not the person who tempted him/her. The belief that the other party is at fault is a fiction invented by the cheated on partner who doesn't want to confront the harsh reality that his/her partner valued an intimate encounter with another person more than keeping together the existing relationship. The only way that I could really see a third party effectively destroying a relationship without either party really consenting is if that person spreads disinformation about each of the partners to their other partner. And a sufficiently trusting relationship can even endure THAT if they manage to get around the third party. If anything, Fox is doing these couples a favour by making sure that they don't end up in the "good enough" trap, and that they are truely compatible. Many relationships, especially early 20's relationships end up in the "good enough" trap, where the partners aren't really what each other wants, but they're "good enough" for now. And then suddenly they're pushed along into marriage, they start panicing a few years down the line when they realize that they could spend the rest of their lives not really being satisfied, and then they make the desperate affair(s) attempt and when the relationship finally goes down, it is much messier for all involved. This is what causes serial monogomy.
The religious right wingers (Disclaimer: I am a Libertarian) are having a fit over this program because it challenges one of their (many) simplistic ideas about relationships. Remember, these kind of people generally value social harmony and peace over the happiness of the individual. ("Who cares that Mrs Johnson lies awake at night, wishing that there was some way out of the house, and Mr Johnson spends long nights down in the basement listening to the radio, drinking and throwing bottles against the concrete walls when the mood hits him? Their nice white picket fenced house with 2.5 children and that nice white dog with the waggy tail is keeping property values up in this area!"). They want to pretend that every relationship should be sacred. Well, they're not. And sexual proficiency is LEARNED, and sexual compatibility is best accertained well BEFORE marriage. Sometimes relationships SHOULD end. And sometimes, the best thing about a certain relationship is the experience that both people gain from it. There may well be a "sacred" relationship for each person in their life, but people generally need a few NON-sacred relationships to learn how to handle and keep the sacred relationship alive.
I've got news for Religious conservatives. A "sexual relationship" (anything above platonic) without the sex isn't the same relationship. All kinds of needs need to be met in the relationship for both people for the relationship to remain healty and viable, and some of those ARE sexual needs. If the relationship is healty and viable, the relationship WILL survive through temptation. The religious people who are complaining about this program are probably worried that it will show how fragile and unstable many of these relationships formed in "abstinance until marriage" conditions really are. My personal observed experience is that they are MUCH less stable compared to pre-maritial sex relationships that made it to marriage through means other then a shotgun wedding.
If religions became more realistic (HA!) about sexual needs in a relationship, and admitted their importance, then maybe many more sanctioned relationships could survive through temptation. But wait, they can't acknowledge the importance of sex in a relationship, because sex is "of the earth" instead of "From the heavens" and therefore is horrendiously dirty and sinful, right? Feh.
In summary, submitting an engaged couple to some temptation and some closer inspection to their needs in the relationship is probably NOT a bad thing. In my opinion, it is a very GOOD thing, and ideally, all engaged couples should go through some kind of rite like this before they actually get married. It could probably save us many MANY divorces.
Of course, Fox didn't create this program to be humanitarian, they wanted to watch a few couples break up and have all kinds of hysterical interviews with their cheated on partners for good ratings. Well, they lost. No one cheated. (although one couple "got upset" at each other). Too bad, Fox. If they had done this show back in the 50's, I'm sure that some of the couples would have cheated. Of course, that kind of show wouldn't have seen the light of day back then. We had more important things to watch.
...in polynomial time, you mean, right?
:)
I don't know; I've never seen "polynomial time" or "exponential time", only the time on my wristwatch.
Polynomial time = exponential time = real time. The only difference between polynomial time and nonpolynomial time is how much time is required, nothing else.
When I say that no deterministic Turing machine will ever be able to solve the Traveling Salesman problem for a reasonably large set of cities, I meant it. Do the power analysis--just flipping enough bits to do the processing would require orders of magnitude more energy than could be liberated from making an entire galaxy go supernova. Do the time analysis--even assuming an ungodly fast machine, the computation couldn't be finished before the computer itself evaporated away due to proton decay.
The only way you can posit that NP problems are solvable is either (a) prove that P=NP, or (b) come up with computers which are made of something other than normal matter, or which run in something other than normal space, or which run on something other than normal energy, or which run in something other than normal time.
In other words, to solve an NP problem requires either (a) a Godlike feat of mathematics, or (b) a Godlike feat of engineering.
If you grant either (a) or (b), then yes, NP problems become solvable. But my counter to that is that once you assume that you're God, everything becomes possible, so the entire godhood argument tends to solve nothing.
It's actually kind of nice that he picked chess. If he had have picked poker, he'd still be gloating. Anyway, he annoys me because he came to what have turned out to be irrefutable (at the moment) conclusions (ie that conventional computers can't give you general "intelligence") through erroneous premises and logic.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
As a fellow neuroscientist, I have to agree. The reason why people want to believe someone like Penrose is that people have a hard time with reducing concepts like "free will" down to a neuroscientific level. Really, I think this is because of a mistaken understanding of the relationship between "free will" and determinism. People believe that "free will" can't exist in a deterministic system. A physicist friend of mine is always trying to argue that point by saying that a murderer could go to his trial and say "Schroedinger's equation made me do it." However, determinism refers to whether or not psi_universe exists, i.e. if some omniscient ueber-being could predict everything that will ever happen. "Free will" refers to decisions that humans make. The making of a decision is something that happens when the physical state of your brain goes one way and not another -- your brain is PART of this whole system. So determinism refers to whether or not the outcome of your decision would have been theoretically predictable, which is not the same as whether or not "free will" operated in the making of that decision.
I'm not saying we will never have AI, or anything like that - I just don't believe it will be on a digital computer.
I think the human brain can be modeled in a purely digital computer, but the idea of the hardware = brain, software = consciousness analogy is all wrong. In this case, it would be hardware = laws of physics going on in the brain, software = physical structure of the brain, and certain patterns that emerge in the output = consciousness and other higher brain function. So in this sense, you're right that a digital computer could never be conscious, for example. However, a digital computer could theoretically run a program that would be. Of course, this isn't AI, this is computational neuroscience, which is my field.
Most civilized countries had abolished slavery by the time the U.S. Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression for you Southern rednecks out there) was fought. Mexico abolished slavery in 1828, over 30 years before the Civil War, so Blacks in the U.S. knew that freedom was more than a pipe dream.
A lot of people know about the Underground Railroad leading slaves northward to freedom, but many don't know that the Mexicans and Chicanos worked hard to move U.S. Black slaves southward to Mexico, where they gained their freedom. In fact, so many Black slaves fled to Mexico from the U.S. that in certain parts of northern Mexico a large percentage of the population is descended from those former slaves...
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You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
For that matter, we can't do molecular level simulation yet. Some chemicals have an effect because although they fasten to a part of the cell which is is not the one which is of interest, the 3-D shape of the chemical molecule happens to block the receptor of interest. True simulation would require knowing the entire 3-D shape of all the chemicals on the surface of a cell as well as what's happening inside. And then there are fun details such as the recent discovery that neurons actually change the number of chemical receptors on their surface, so the surface can change...
At this point you've crossed the line into blithering idiocy. Saying "I'm not quite as confident in the fundamental limits of computational power as defined by heat death" is all fine and well, provided you can show reason to believe thermodynamics is not an ultimate limitation.
If I say "I'm not quite confident that reality exists", I can give all sorts of philosophy to back it up. But guess what? Until I present evidence which suggests something that radical, I'm just philosophizing.
If I say "I'm not quite confident that time really exists", ditto. But if I'm Julian Barbour and I can present evidence to back up my beliefs, then people take me seriously.
Now you're saying "I don't think thermodynamics are the ultimate limitation in computation that people make them out to be." That's great. Tell you what; as soon as you can present me with evidence that suggests thermodynamics, particularly the First and Second Laws, are invalid in the context of computation, then I'll take you seriously.
Until then, you're a blithering idiot.
let us see now...
you say we do not know enough biology to simulate it accurately.
eh, but we know well how to interpret what we learn from torturing for the benefit of men.
these hymns cannot both be true.