Slashdot Mirror
A Faster Jigsaw Solving Algorithm
mikejuk writes "Andrew Gallagher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York has improved the standard approach to automated jigsaw solving by copying what humans do in finding groups of pieces that best match and working outwards from there. With a speed of 10,000 pieces per 24 hours, it can solve large puzzles. Not only that, but the type of jigsaw it solves is more difficult than the usual in that the pieces are square and can be placed in any orientation. It is so good it can even solve problems consisting of a number of mixed up pieces without being told how many or their dimensions. Of course, as well as having fun beating humans at another recreational pastime, the technique could be used to unscramble shredded documents, as per the recent DARPA challenge."
If you're working in the information technology arena, and your job doesn't involve focused application of creativity, the time to start refocusing your career objectives is now.
Somebody will still need to "flip them burgers" even in IT (e.g. in an era of algorithmic trading and fighting for milli/micro-seconds, there is still a need to maintain alive some COBOL code written 1980 or before: what's so creative in this?)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Obviously I don't understand the complexity here but it seems like that is a long time.
By my logic:
- pick 1 of the pieces as a start and pick 1 side of that piece
- now pick another piece and there are 4 possible arrangements to match your selected starting side (assuming square-ish pieces)
- on average, you'll need to check 1/2 of the remaining 9,999 pieces to get the matching one and each of 4 orientations
- so the first side of the first piece will requires, on average, 19998 checks
- next edge you select will need 19996 checks
- and so on
So that basically totals 99 million checks over 24 hours ...
At a implied rate of 1100 or so comparisons per second ... ok - dont worry ... I guess that's pretty good when you have to decide whether each combination is a match of not.
Sounds like an interesting problem - guess I should read the paper !
Finally someone has made real progress in solving one of the world's most pressing problems.
Now that jigsaw puzzles can be solved much more quickly, world peace is an achievable goal!.
Yes.
Slow insertion.
Uhh, no... this algorithm cannot be generalized. It lacks a means to determine whether a proposed solution is valid or invalid. It simply proposes solutions. But it can fail to satisfy problems with known solutions. This is a strategy, not a solution method.
Let's give it the american politicial system layout.
If you're working, and your job doesn't involve focused application of creativity, the time to start refocusing your career objectives is now.
FTFY. In time, even jobs involving focused application of creativity will be replaced. No job is safe from AI in the end.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
Hopefully "machine intelligence" is an oxymoron like "artificial intelligence".
People wishing forr the Singularity is the thing same as turkeys voting for Christmas.
I'm a lowly technician. So long as there are printers, someone has to go around the rooms clearing paper jams and putting new cartridges in.
In light of this, my message is simple. If you're working in the information technology arena, and your job doesn't involve focused application of creativity, the time to start refocusing your career objectives is now.
Marginal improvements in machine "intelligence" and almost all information technology bear no relation to human creativity. They are concerned with making machines do the equivalent of manual labour.
The day a computer can write a poem is the day we should destroy all computers above the very basic level we have today.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No job is safe from AI in the end.
No job is safe from the wrath of Cthulhu either. Fortunaely both are fictions.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Or in this particular case, progress towards a very specific book by an author you didn't mention: Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End. Time to shred the libraries. Time for the rise of the Librarians Militant. (Speaking of, has anybody written Librarians Militant fan fiction?)
The march of progress goes on. Every month, new announcements are made that indicate machine intelligence is moving a couple of steps forward.
Where's the "intelligence" in this algorithm?
ever spun around when urinating in a public restroom and stating over and over in a monotone robotic voice:
âoeDrop it!â âoeI am Robocop!â âoeThank you for your cooperation!â
Every month, new announcements are made that indicate machine intelligence is moving a couple of steps forward.
You are joking right? Have you ever written a computer program? A computer program has nothing to do with intelligence: It is a dumb fixed piece of code that always does the same job, namely the thing the programmer wrote down.
If the computer had a mind, it would perhaps be intelligent, depending on how it was created.
But even so-called AI has never achieved something even remotely like intelligence or sentience.
I've been programming computers non-stop since 1981 and I've never ever seen signs of "machine intelligence" b/c it's just a pipe dream created by people that never wrote a program.
On the morning of May 3rd, Sichuan Chengdu city resident Lin Zhaoqiang carried 50,000 yuan in torn 100 yuan bills from Chengdu Jintang to the Bank of China Sichuan Branch, looking for help. May 1st, Lin Zhaoqiang's wife all of a sudden had a fit and tore the 50,000 yuan life-saving money into pieces. Facing thousands of pieces of cash, 12 bank employees sorted and spliced for 6 hours only to piece together a single 100 yuan bill. The remaining money, if unable to be pieced back together, face the unfortunate possibility of being declared null and invalid. Because this money is for treating his wife's mental illness, Lin Zhaoqiang said he won't give up.
One of the commenters said they should just weigh the cash, but obviously that would be too simple. Nothing is simple when dealing with Chinese banks and their ridiculous rules. They'll flat-out refuse to take small bills or coins ("What the heck are we going to do with all these jiao notes? What are we, a bank or something?")
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
A possible improvement to the algorithm would be to check all new edges during a merge of two components rather than just testing for whether the constraint of planarity is violated. This would avoid errors in merges - many of the sample images show components that join well on one or two edges, but badly on others.
http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/PoemGen/PoemGen.htm
First result on google.
Best get started on destroying everything.
it piece back together a shredded document which has been put through incineration.
I'm a lowly technician. So long as there are printers, someone has to go around the rooms clearing paper jams and putting new cartridges in.
Well then, your job should be safe for quite some time, as "paperless" office ranks right up there with IPv6.
I find it sad that people actually think AI or any sort of AI is actually present here, or improving when they read about things like this.
There is no intelligence here. Nothing. There's no guesswork, only statistics, rigorously calculated and applied the same every single time. It's a heuristic. It's programmed. It's immutable. It's basically a targeted improvement on a naive brute-force algorithm.
That's *not* how intelligence works. To be honest, the nearest thing to "intelligence" we've had recently is the Kinect, but only because it was based on a genetic algorithm at one point and tweaked incessantly. And even that is more brute-force and dedicated processors than anything else.
There has NEVER been, in the whole field of AI, a logical leap to join two abstract concepts. There has never been discovery or invention (no matter how minor) on the same scale as even a pigeon. No machine ever worked out something that it wasn't told how to do DOWN TO THE LETTER.
This is not AI. Your science fiction is, and for the foreseeable future still will be, just that - fiction. There's nothing a computer does today that isn't just 60's theory and ideas applied with a sufficiently large amount of processing power to come up with pretty predictable results that do not approach AI. Yes, eventually, brute-force will allow us to come to resemble intelligence but it will not be intelligence, and brute-force is the most expensive thing to apply to a problem like that (and, strangely, own our intelligence is the cheapest!).
Literally, the closest we get is genetic algorithms and lettings things just run off on their own, and we're pretty sure even that's just an illusion and not crossed the line into something we would consider actual intelligence. There's an example of a GA put to work on a chip design to distinguish two frequencies of input. When the input is of one frequency, it activates one output, when the input is of another frequency, it activates another. The GA "evolved" through generations based only on selection for those criteria and ended up with ingenious solution that took years of analysis to understand fully.
But even that isn't "intelligence", so much as blind luck and brute-force. No machine, for the next 50-100 years at least, will be able to hold even quite a boring conversation with you (go look at the transcripts of Turing Test entries from as far back as you can and now - improvement but still no magic insight that makes it seem human unless you're terminally stupid). It certainly won't have a consistent or reasoned opinion. And certainly not one that it come to by itself and wasn't just a case of it picking a contrary / popular opinion deliberately.
Prove me wrong, by all means, but sci-fi is for the TV. I still can't get my phone to recognise my voice on a simple phrase 8 times out of 10 and that has vast quantities of brute-force, previous patterns, pattern-matching code and statistics to work from. Sure, it *looks* impressive and intelligent when you say "Where is the post office?" and it analyses the waveform to think you said "post office" with 85% certainty and then stick that into a basic search to see what comes up in the local area. But it's NOT understanding what you said. Not by a long shot. If I'd said "Where's the post? Office?", it will get it completely, 100% absolutely wrong and I can't teach it to get it right even the same amount of the time that any trained animal would.
This is not AI. Please stop thinking it is. It's pseudo-related at best.
The original paper was written at Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories. I am guessing we won't be seeing a follow up paper from him.
You're making a pretty big leap in assuming that intelligence exists in the way you suppose. Our brains are just statistical automata that can with sufficient training carry out some logical operations.
[FUCK BETA]
I find it sad that people actually think AI or any sort of AI is actually present here, or improving when they read about things like this.
There is no intelligence here. Nothing. There's no guesswork, only statistics, rigorously calculated and applied the same every single time. It's a heuristic. It's programmed. It's immutable. It's basically a targeted improvement on a naive brute-force algorithm.
You mean like a human brain?
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
It's clear that you have never written AI software and know nothing about it.
I am tempted to bring up this certain rather popular Book in this context, just to stir things up a little. But that would probably constitute trolling.
Now excuse me will I take time to read the FA, because the subject is indeed rather interesting from a technical point of view. Haven't done much image processing/recognition for a while but it is rather cool subject for research.
Yes. We're moving into a new building now, and we were supposed to be going paperless: No printers, except for a big A3 MFD for posters and such. There aren't many departments left that haven't asked to be made an exception and granted a printer or five, and I know that a few more will be asking after the move.
"There has NEVER been, in the whole field of AI, a logical leap to join two abstract concepts. There has never been discovery or invention (no matter how minor) on the same scale as even a pigeon. No machine ever worked out something that it wasn't told how to do DOWN TO THE LETTER."
None of this is true. You are simply ignorant of the facts of AI programs, which include proof-finding programs.
Humans are Special. We're Special Snowflakes. Nothing can be like us!
"In light of this, my message is simple. If you're working in the information technology arena, and your job doesn't involve focused application of creativity, the time to start refocusing your career objectives is now."
Even if the rest of what you wrote wasn't a stupid and mistaken inference, this certainly would be.
I never really understood this kind of fear of 'artificial intelligence'. I mean, yes we have all seen HAL9000 and Skynet in the movies, but what I never understood about those (aside from why they thought it was a good idea to put both systems in full control of mission critical stuff) was that they were supposed to be even remotely human-like.
Even if we do create artificial intelligence it'll be *nothing* like human intelligence. First off all there is no reason to make a computer that might decide it does not want to do whatever it is you ask it do. Secondly this hypothetical AI would interact with and perceive the world in a completely different way from humans.
I don't think there is any reason at all to fear the AI.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
Why cut the picture up into pieces in the first place?
You must have misread me. I'm not afraid of AI. Given enough time we'll make an AI that's way smarter than us, and it'll likely be able to govern us much better and fairer than we can govern ourselves. Or it will annihilate us completely, without any real way for us to defend ourselves.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
You must have misread me. I'm not afraid of AI. Given enough time we'll make an AI that's way smarter than us, and it'll likely be able to govern us much better and fairer than we can govern ourselves. Or it will annihilate us completely, without any real way for us to defend ourselves.
Why do you think that?
Why would we even give the AIs WE create any sort of drive to surpass us? Why would we even give it any sort of a anthropomorphism? Why wouldn't we specifically design it to work with us and not against us?
Personally I think that when/if we ever create the AI, it'll be a non-verbal thing that sits somewhere in a black box and does the same things that we normally use computers for.
It'll in largely indistinguishable from what we use today, at least to anyone who is not into computers.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
Your paper shredder is no longer sufficient. I am here to market to you a paper burner!
insert inflammatory comment here!
"I never really understood this kind of fear of 'artificial intelligence'."
Lots of people are afraid of intelligence, period. No matter if it's software or wetware.
Remember, half of the people out there have an IQ under 100, they feel threatened.
I've studied the prospects of LISP and Prolog and found them unsuitable for real AI. They're just data structure management, nothing more.
Don't get circumcised, then you can carry it under your foreskin.
"The day a computer can write a poem..."
Can _you_ write one?
You cannot evaluate computers by comparing them to a handful of exceptional people who happen be good at one thing.
Or do you consider the 6 billion people who can't write poems not to be intelligent?
"There has NEVER been, in the whole field of AI, a logical leap to join two abstract concepts. There has never been discovery or invention (no matter how minor) on the same scale as even a pigeon. No machine ever worked out something that it wasn't told how to do DOWN TO THE LETTER."
None of this is true. You are simply ignorant of the facts of AI programs, which include proof-finding programs.
Correct. Grandparent post is symptomatic of someone who has not actually studied A.I. or one of its subfields and assumes that Kinect is the "nearest thing we had recently to intelligence." The problem of joining two abstract concepts is long ago solved by inference engines.
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
The keyword here is Artificial (in AI). What you describe is Artificial, in that it resembles but isn't intelligence. What people usually think of when hearing AI is what I would call Created Intelligence. IMO, AI can describe almost anything where human intelligence and reasoning has been encoded in an algorithm, and in that sense it surely does exist - Created Intelligence however, which is what we strive towards, does not.
What people are worried about is the unspoken "E" word in there. Evolution, that is. When an AI starts to learn for itself and starts making decisions. Specifically, decisions we don't like.
When an AI becomes Aldo, does a Nancy Reagan and just says "no".
The natural reaction of many humans would be to consider it defective and pull the plug. Software that doesn't do the task it was designed for has bugs. Stop the task, tweak the code.
But what if the software has developed a self-preservation instinct and doesn't want the plug pulled? See M-5 in Star Trek episode The Ultimate Computer.
From cogito ergo sum straight to iuguolo totus humanus is the fear.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I think rhere are a number of key differences in drive. AI motivation will unlikely work in the same way as ours (or we're doomed from the start). But once they're smarter than us, we will have them design even smarter versions, and once they reach IQs of over 400, there's no way we could possibly hope to imagine what goes on inside their brains. We could be manipulated as easily as ants.
But I still think that if we're given enough time on this planet, super intelligent and fully autonomous AI is inevitable. It excites me more than it scares me.
Still, as a Christian, I don't believe we'll ever get that far. And maybe we shouldn't, either.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
You have made a bunch of sweeping generalisations about human intelligence there. We can't even explain conciousness yet; nor can we define the mechanism by which the subconcious and the concious interact to produce action. How can you make these claims?
How do you know our brains aren't simply super-massively parallel pattern matching machines? All human learning is achieved through the feedback loop of try something, observe the results (positive / negative), adjust, and try again. Everything from learning to walk to mastering a musical instrument works very similarly to this.
My theory is that our brains subconciously monitor the thousands or millions of variables which must be considered when walking and take note of the states of those variables upon each step (each trial). After many many trials, our brain identifies patterns in those variables which result in successful steps; successful walking behaviour emerges, not because we are "intelligent", but because we noticed the pattern by - guess what - brute force!
And what do you mean by "predictable results"? Humans are very predictable creatures for the overwhelming majority of our lives. We respond predictably to positive and negative stimulus. In fact, humans deal very poorly with randomness. Our brains are wired to recognise patterns and randomness just doesn't fit in. For a good example of this, go to a casino and listen out for all the ridiculous plans people come up with for winning. These people are noticing patterns where there are none because that's how our brains map reality.
In short - I believe you are largely mistaken, and I am doubtful if you've ever actually studied AI or have really thought seriously about how little we know about our own minds.
What people are worried about is the unspoken "E" word in there. Evolution, that is. When an AI starts to learn for itself and starts making decisions. Specifically, decisions we don't like.
Still don't get it? Why would we even allow it to evolve? These machines will ultimately be created and controlled by us, it would be almost trivial for us to control their evolution and decision making processes.
Why would we do the "let the AIs build smarter versions of themselves"-thing to begin with? Why would not just let them design smarter versions and then build them ourselves after we put in the limitations we decide they need?
Besides the "computer does not want to be turned off"-scenario assumes the computer interprets 'being turned off' as 'death', which is just idiotic. Death is a uniquely biological concept, a computer would not have a concept of death as anything other then "that thing that the squishy flesh bags do sometimes", being turned off wouldn't affect it in the least, it could simply be turned on again and it would go right back to doing its thing.
What I really don't get is why we keep thinking that artificial intelligence will be anything at all like human intelligence, almost every aspect of our intelligence is a result of our biology and how we use that biology to interact with the world around us. None of that would apply to an artificial intelligence that is a warehouse full of computers, such a computer might interact with the world fully through sifting through whatever data is available on the internet and what gets fed to it, it would not necessarily think in any way that would be at all familiar to us, it would have completely different concepts of thought.
My point being, that if we build a computer that eventually surpasses and supplants us, it will be because WE allowed it to happen.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
I agree there will be a number of key differences in drive. The major factor I see is whether or not AI will be fully complete in software and not dependent on the underlying hardware, as we are.
If so, it could replicate as needed and the path taken for self-preservation would be significantly different from ours. It would essentially remove us as a potential threat.
Yes, I also believe it is inevitable. Should we? I don't think we *can't*. One day the threshold will be passed and we won't even know it until well after the fact. (See: The Singularity)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The problem is AI is about machine learning. We design them to learn on their own. That is the point. To get them to figure out better, more efficient ways of completing tasks.
The paths taken to complete those tasks make go in directions we didn't anticipate. And the complexity of the systems get to such a point where we don't know what they know or which bits are critical to the task performance.
All physical things decay. I just replaced a CPU fan in a laptop last week and am in the middle of salvaging a dying hard drive. Death is a real danger for everything.
As for "let them build", it we're talking software only, we won't necessarily be involved. I'm not talking industrial robots here.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
When an AI becomes Aldo, does a Nancy Reagan and just says "no".
I'm a lot more worried about AI going all Nomad-Must-Sterilize on us.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Here every edge has a color distribution and another edge of another tile with matching distribution. The fundamental solution was proposed originally in a Perry Mason novel by Erle Stanley Gardener. (As reported by Donald Knuth in his book/manual on TeX ). Perry Mason asks Paul Drake to find the two rentals by the same person just half an hour apart. Paul Drake says, "there are thousands of rental records, I would never find the match in time". Perry Mason says, "Nah. Just sort all the records by name, and look for duplicates".
Sorting by name, is grandiloquently called "Lexicographic Ordering" in comp sci. Create a lexicographic value for the color distribution on each edge, sort it by that order and look for duplicates. Here areas of uniform color would get multiple duplicates and one has to prune the tree. That is where these guys claim to have made some improvement. It is a nice problem I would give to some master's students learning heavy duty scientific computing. But I think shape matching has a lot more potential in developing antibodies and medicines.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You mean like a human brain?
I guess it depends upon the person you are talking about.
In all seriousness though, the human brain is still very much a black box, depending upon what area you are focusing on. Some of the processes are more or less scripted in some way (i.e. keep the heart beating) where as others have a large question mark next to them for how they might work (i.e. the creative process of artists).
How do you know our brains aren't simply super-massively parallel pattern matching machines? All human learning is achieved through the feedback loop of try something, observe the results (positive / negative), adjust, and try again. Everything from learning to walk to mastering a musical instrument works very similarly to this.
Since you posted AC I'm not sure if you are actually following this tread, but that is a bit of a gross exaggeration as there are a number of intuitive leaps recorded throughout human history. Off the top of my head Nikola Tesla likely made a number of these and reading his biographies you note that he visualized most devices before constructing them where on they worked as expected, in his earlier years at least. Brute force processes wouldn't necessarily lead to this.
Don't worry fellow humans. I bet it has no chance at solving the jig saw puzzles in the new iPad game called JiggleSaw. The pictures aren't fixed but constantly changing. That would require a huge amount of processing power.
"With a speed of 10,000 pieces per 24 hours" is not useful. What is the time complexity?
I find it sad that people actually think AI or any sort of AI is actually present here, or improving when they read about things like this.
There are two problems here. One is that movies and science fiction set the bar very high - to full human intelligence, because that is what is most fun to write about. The other problem is that for we keep redefining what practical AI means. If you showed Siri to someone in 1975, they would be blown away. Unfortunately, their basis in Science Fiction would convince them that in 2012 they could buy a home on Mars and get there with a flying car.
But please don't act like AI made progress. But just like with every other superstition, once you understand it, it doesn't seem magical any longer. Solving a jigsaw puzzle is just an algorithm. And speech recognition is just an algorithm. And natural language processing is just an algorithm. And driving a car on a real road, and playing robosoccer... Eventually, when someone builds an android with full human intelligence, someone will dismiss it as just being a standard implementation of a positronic algorithm. meh, who cares? Humans achieved this thousands of years ago, right?
That is an easy problem to solve if you don't care which side of the document you recover.
You mean like a human brain?
I guess it depends upon the person you are talking about.
In all seriousness though, the human brain is still very much a black box, depending upon what area you are focusing on. Some of the processes are more or less scripted in some way (i.e. keep the heart beating) where as others have a large question mark next to them for how they might work (i.e. the creative process of artists).
Its neural networks all the way down. OP ( ledow ) missed whole science field of machine learning. Stupid perceptron will learn to "distinguish two frequencies of input".
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
>No machine, for the next 50-100 years at least, will be able to hold even quite a boring conversation with you
"boring". You overestimate people a whole bunch of whom are fascinated by conversations with cleverbot, etc.
You are absolutely right on the matter of AI being absent in present computers, you just omitting the fact that I (artificial or natural) is absent in a lot of people as well.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
They should program in virtual 3 year old to attempt occasional toddler attacks on the puzzle, attempting to eat, and occasionally succeeding in carting off pieces it then the system has to scour it's house (system files?) to find...
I am actually working to convert my brain to non-artificial brute-force machine without a trace of intelligence applying brute force approach to futoshiki and kakuro.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Original AC here - you make a good point regarding Tesla. I still don't think that rules out that his thinking wasn't some hyper-intense version of what I described. It's possible that there's more at work than brute force pattern matching, though - and I don't understand the human mind enough to contest it further.
However, this does nicely illustrate the central point I was trying to make. What is intelligence? You are setting the bar pretty damned high by reaching for Tesla. Most humans will never come close to achieving what he did - does that mean that all such humans are not intelligent? I've never made any kind of leap like he did, but I consider myself 'intelligent'.
Consider the ability to logically exclude contradicting information to form correct conclusions. 'Intelligent' humans are good at this; stupid ones typically are not (at least, that's my experience). Computers are also very good at this. On this basis, how can you consider the stupid humans to be 'intelligent' in comparison to computers? (What is intelligence?)
I'm reminded of a bit of dialogue from I, Robot (paraphrased): Will Smith: You're not human. Can you compose a symphony, write a song, create art? Robot: Can you?
Where is the line? I don't know, but I don't think it's anywhere near as cut and dry as the GP made it, theoretically speaking. In most cases, I believe the major difference is processing power, as even a stupid human commands astronomically more parallel processing ability than current era computers.
Can someone please mod down the parent.
What he/she is saying is that to be AI it has to have a ??? step, as in:
1) Read input
2) Process data
3) ???
4) Print out results
Because the examples above have an explainable third step ledow does not consider it proper AI.... pshaw!
Heck, it's a computer. It can only do what is supposed to do (just like the human brain). If either one of them learns is because it was built to learn, "DOWN TO THE LETTER" (automatic 10pt IQ discount for using all caps, btw).
"Of course, as well as having fun beating humans at another recreational pastime, the technique could be used to unscramble shredded documents, as per the recent DARPA challenge."
Now I have a valid reason to put a burning barrel in my office. Now, if I can only find a reason to stock Thunderbird and some 'bos, it'd be a pleasurable place to work.
there are a number of intuitive leaps recorded throughout human history.
I'll say. Off the top of my head superstition is still a force to be reckoned with despite mankind's intellectual progress. I think the Vulcans would disagree with you on how beneficial intuition is.
AI assessor, debugger, and maintainer. Seems like a safe bet. When the AI is good enough to assess, debug, and maintain AI, you have a natural shift to AI assessing ai assessor, debugger, and maintainer. Rinse and repeat.
I've got a self scoring and self organizing neural net that disagrees.Recognizes patterns and shapes, basic maths, and at some point it gets bored and stops doing what I tell it to. When it gets bored with the lack of stimulation it goes back to paying attention. Granted it isn't human level but its only 50k neurons not 100 billion.
Give it time.
"First off all there is no reason to make a computer that might decide it does not want to do whatever it is you ask it do."
The ability to decide what one wants to do rather than what you are asked/told to do is pretty much the true definition of intelligence. There really isn't much practical reason to make an AI but that doesn't mean someone won't do it. There also is SOME practical purpose. If you want something that can dynamically solve problems for which we haven't mapped out an algorithm yet an intelligence is what you need. Of course, if you need a massive self scoring neural net to solve your problems, humans are 100 billion unit walking neural nets and fairly plentiful and cheap.
That said there is no particular reason to fear the AI any more than you'd fear other humans. The AI would just be a large self scoring neural net and that is all humans are. Granted, it would probably be coolest if given links to other neural nets and allowed to form neural connections around those links to effectively form a giant neural net. But that is all humans are. Neural nets with audio/light interfaces to one another.
Not likely anytime soon. We think of ourselves as individuals but actually our neurons are the individuals. We are like an island for neurons that gives them the ecosystem they need. A person is an emergence of a pocket of neurons in isolation. But as has been seen in brain/computer interface studies, those neurons will respond to and interact with anything they can given the chance not just the physical parts that are "you". Our neural pocket can interface fastest with the neurons in your head and directly connected nervous system but your neurons interface with the neurons in the bodies of other people as well via the audio and light interfaces that are vision and sound. From the perspective of an individual neuron, there really is no difference between a signal that was introduced by another neuron when you pricked your finger or one that was introduced by seeing something. Its all just patterns and IO. The only difference is the speed at which data is transmitted.
So when two people are interacting they are effectively a two unit single brain that is 200 billion neurons strong rather than 100 billion. If you kill one of them or severe the connection the result is no different than if you kill a large portion of your individual brain. The data stored in those neurons is gone. The two units are not unlike the groupings of neurons within our brains. Three people and it scales to 300 billion neurons. According to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population there are about 7.021 billion people, each with 100 billion neurons. Thanks to the internet we've developed a literally light speed interface to many of those other pockets of neurons, effectively forming one hell of a giant brain. That brain is persistent. While individual units wither and die the collective brain does not. It just grows smarter over time.
For AI to beat mankind it would have to be smarter than the collective giant brain not the individual one. That said, I doubt we are going to manage to develop and AI that isn't based on units that detect patterns in and learn to interface with their environment in a similar manner to our own neurons. At that point, the AI is PART of our collective brain.
We shouldn't be watching skynet or HAL we should be watching the borg. But just like I don't see any especial reason AI is more likely to be evil than a human intelligence I see no reason for the units to be robotic like the borg. You can't learn much without interaction and at the core of interaction is creativity and expression.
"Why would we even give the AIs WE create any sort of drive to surpass us?"
It isn't an AI if we decide its opinions. An AI doesn't determine its course of action through per-determined programming. It is self programming and learning. At best we can attempt to guide it via environment and there is always a chance that it will learn to utilize data we didn't expect or in ways we didn't expect to change its environment. For instance, our own internal AI communicates with audio and visual feedback. If you give your AI these things (probable) it can probe that interface, finding things that we repeat. It can then begin to craft images and sounds that trigger reward pathways in our brains in the same manner that games do. Combining this it can spread ideas and images that trigger reward pathways. Now the AI is training us in much the same manner we train the AI or the way we train an animal or even another human.
Because we don't have a choice. If we decide to build a new AI based on the instructions of the "old" AI with an IQ of say, 500, there's no way we could be sure we could control it or know exactly how its decision making process works. I think it's a little naive and optimistic to think we could control something several times smarter than us, even if we keep it caged.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
Any sufficiently advanced algorithm is indistinguishable from intelligence.
Ironically, one of the big AI-is-coming-and-then-some people, Mr. Omega Point himself, Vernor Vinge, in his sci-fi novel Rainbows End, has tech where they actually digitize books by throwing them into a shredder which blows the confetti up into the air and high-speed, high resolution cameras feed it into computers which un-jigsaw it.
This irritates people because the book is destroyed in the process, but it is all done throuh prosaic programming, not AI.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Actually, AI people debate about whether humans are truly intelligent -- it's a running joke that every time people figure out a solution that is generally agreed to require intelligence, it turns out it doesn't.
Some more famous cases are chess, pattern recognition, voice recognition, voice synthesis, character recognition, and walking and hopping.
This is not just bad guessing -- when people say, well, a humam is intelligemt because they have a "deep understanding" of X, nobody really knows if that statement has any real meaning -- humans may just be a big bag of specialized but prosaic routines.
Facial recognition? Guess
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.