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Wolfram Promises Computing That Answers Questions
An anonymous reader writes "Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram feels that he has put together at least the initial version of a computer that actually answers factual questions, a la Star Trek's ship computers. His version will be found on their Web-based application, Wolfram Alpha. What does this mean? Well, instead of returning links to pages that may (or may not) contain the answer to your questions, Wolfram will respond with the actual answer. Just imagine typing in 'How many bones are in the human body?' and getting the answer." Right now, though the search entry field is in place, Alpha is not yet generally available -- only "to a few select individuals."
Q: How many bones are in the human body
A: Did you mean cumulatively or at any point in time?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I don't think this can be examined without language issues. Lojban attempts to make a parsable constructed language (currently undergoing a few grammar issues, but mostly locked down). As we get closer to the Singularity, with regards to infant-style general AI and perhaps even transhuman implants (thought detector or such), we'll see perhaps a myriad of unambiguous languages.
Any language that is truly unambiguous is uninteresting. Firstly, you've got Goedel incompleteness to worry about (which stems from statements that are fundamentally ambiguous as to their interpretation, such as "this statement is false"). Secondly, languages are there for people to communicate with, and people seem to prefer ambiguity. Ask a poet if you need proof of that.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
It goes further than that. Try Googling "how old is Britney Spears" and "what is the population of iceland" (without quotes). The answer appears at the top, separately from the search results.
Are you limited to yes/no answers?
Why are people presuming that the program will be limited to yes/no answers?
Q: Will you answer no to this question?
A: It's rather unlikely.
(Or, "I doubt it" or any of several different answers.)
There are enough legitimate paradoxes that you don't need to construct such obvious losers.
How about:
Is "This statement is false." false?
It's still easy enough to handle (in several different ways), but at least it's a valid challenge.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
To my mind, any reasonable definition of understanding a subject includes the ability to reason based on information about the subject. In the case of a question, this would include the ability to say, at the very least, whether a given answer is a correct answer for the question.
From this, we can see that if we can build a reasoning engine that can determine if a given answer is correct for a question, hypothetically we can iterate over a large set of answers and apply our filter to each one. This provides us with a machine to answer questions (although depending on the size of the set of answers, "I don't know" might be a frequent response) which (by my definition, at least) 'understands' the question.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Try checking the number of horns on a bicorn and you'll see that the google engine is not intelligent, artificial or otherwise. Or would you like to argue that bicorns are not real, and therefore don't count?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
It goes further than that. Try Googling "how old is Britney Spears" and "what is the population of iceland" (without quotes). The answer appears at the top, separately from the search results.
Google them together, it returns your post!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I have always hated Searle's Chinese room "paradox", since it is just playing a semantic game with the definition of the system. The claim that the person in the room doesn't understand things is no different from saying that a neuron doesn't understand things, or that 1/4 of my brain alone doesn't understand things. The "rules" in the box are part of the system, and I would claim that if it passes the test, the person+rules do demonstrate understanding. We have no evidence that human thought somehow transcends the model of executed rules anyway; at some level it is all chemistry and physics.
A modern example would be that my CPU (::person in box) doesn't know how to behave as a web browser. While true, my computer does know how to be a web browser when you add the software (::rules), and an input and output system (::box interface). The Chinese room paradox is just yanking out the CPU and saying that it doesn't know how to be a web browser. Nice trick.
The other thing the "paradox" does it to try to evoke imagery of a very simple ruleset because it is a person executing rules on paper, which would be very slow. The person executing paper rules is slow enough to have the computational power of a few neurons at best, while the brain has ~100 billion. So the equivalent rules in the paradox's imagined transformation would never fit in a room and could not be executed to completion by a person before their death. While it is supposed to be a thought experiment, the relative scale is so incredibly different that it makes imagining it difficult, and I wonder if it was chosen for that purpose. I will cut Searle some slack though, since Turing's guess about how much computing power needed to pass the Turing test was ridiculously low (~50 MB of storage), when compared to what we now know of human brain capabilities.
I think the appeal of the paradox is that deep down many people want to believe that we are qualitatively different from computers, rather than quantitatively so. As for me, I'm happy enough knowing that atop my shoulders sits a computer with more raw processing power than the largest supercomputer, with rules/programming far beyond anything we can create now, or perhaps for hundreds of years.