Hitachi Develops New Visual Search

Tech.Luver writes to tell us that Hitachi has developed a new visual search engine that can supposedly find similar images from within millions of video and picture data entries in around 1 second. "The technology assesses the similarity of images based on image characteristics presented as high-dimensional numeric information. The information is acquired by automatically detecting information regarding the images, such as color distribution and shapes."

Comments

pr0n

[tronicum]

great! new way to find even more porn.

Re:Hmmm.... robotics?

[lawpoop]

Your implication is that the human mind cannot be reduced to a Turing machine. I am in the other camp--who believe that the mind is subject to rigorous physical law, and that physical law can be expressed arithmetically (in principle), and so the human mind is a Turing machine.

I'm not saying that the mind is not subject to physical law, or is not based on math. All I'm saying is that the mind is not a Turing machine ( though it probably would have to have a Turing machine in it somewhere ). It's a different *kind* of machine, not a super-powerful Turing machine.

Goedel basically showed that a Turing machine cannot do *all* the kinds of math that a human mind can do ( though it can do some). Not that a Turing machine lacks a certain amount of power, but just that it never will. It's just quantitavely the wrong tool for the job. It doesn't matter how much power you give it; the 'weakest' Turing machine is essentially the same as the 'strongest' one; it just simply can't do certain things. If a human is able to perceive and understand this, to know something that a Turing machine can't know, then the mind cannot *solely* be a Turing machine. This does not mean that the mind is not a different *kind* of machine, based on physical law, instead of some mystic hocus-pocus; it's just that it's not a Turing machine. My claim is that the mind is a qualitatively different kind of machine, not a Turing machine.

Goedel's theorem says that a consistent arithmetic system will contain unprovable truths. Put otherwise, such a system cannot be both consistent and complete. Thus the Goedel counterargument to Strong AI (that human minds and computers are not fundamentally different) is that humans (e.g. mathematicians) can prove things like Godel's theorem, so we are able to "rise above" the arithmetic and exist in states of full proof and full consistency.

But I think there is a flaw in that logic (note: I am not a mathematician). The theorem doesn't preclude that a given arithmetic system (e.g. human mind) will be able to prove a truth that a weaker system ignored. Thus our ability to see certain truths doesn't mean that there are not other truths that are unprovable to us.

I don't think the implication of Goedel's theorem shows that we 'rise above' the Turing machine, but rather that we have a qualitatively different awareness or knowledge that a Turing machine doesn't have.

Goedel's theorem is recursive. Any human mathematician can see that no matter how powerful the symbolic system is, the Turing machine will never be complete; there will be truths that the system can't prove. No matter how much you expand a particular system to show any truth a weaker system missed, there will be more truths that the newer, more powerful system missed. This process can go on ad naseum into infinity. A human mind can perceive this foray into eternity, but the Turing machine has no way of proving it. How could a human mind perceive something that a Turing machine couldn't, unless we had some component that was fundamentally different than a Turing machine?

What we seem to have that the Turing machine doesn't is meta-knowledge. We can see that any attempt to create a complete and consistent arithmetic system on a Turing machine will just lead to an endless series of more powerful systems that produce ever more elusive truths, and the process never ends. In this sense the Turing machine is 'myopic' -- it will never stop and say "Hey, I'm not getting anywhere with this; this is an infinite loop. No matter how powerful the system is, there will always be more truths that it cannot express." It's unable to know what it can't know, so to speak. However, as humans, we can somehow see the 'big picture', that no matter how powerful a system you make, there will always be another level of truths out there.

More fundamentally, no one has actually shown that the human mind is either consistent or complete (proving both would be required to sh