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The Emerging-Behavior Debate
weezer writes "Interesting article about 'emergent behavior' of complex robots/devices. This was all over the news tonight too: theories about machines being able to "Think" on their own. Read more about it. " What do you folks think (no pun intended) - how much differently will machines/devices think? Or do they?
Why People Think Computers Can't
We've known this about AI for some time now. You can find examples of 'emergent behavior' in simple games, like Conway's Game of Life.
:) but whenever I do it by hand, it seems much harder...
From a few simple rules and their interactions, much complexity springs. It only takes maybe 12 rules to do predicate calculus, (not much PROLOG at all
The problem is that not everything can be neatly quantized into rules. That's the problem that the Cyc project has always faced, and they're probably closer to getting a self-learning system than anyone is.
I would love to see AI produce results, I'm sure machines could think and solve complex problems, reason and reach conclusions as we do, but just encoding the basic knowledge we take for granted is a huge task, and trying to make a machine with the capability of doing all of that itself is an even larger one.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Humans have a very narrow understanding of intelligence. Our basic inferiority complex puts us on the highest scale of intelligence, and yet we can't even communicate with dolphins.
When computers are intelligent, it's going to be very hard for the majority of people to be able to deal with it. There are many reasons for this.
* Anything that removes the concepts of free will and human speciality destroys the basis of many religious and philosophical belief systems.
* The emergence of an intelligence which is non-human based is threatening to our self-centered view of the universe.
* Acceptance of computer intelligence (which is modular and hence expandible) puts the limits of human intelligence right in our face.
Computer intelligence is coming. I don't think we are ready to deal with it yet. It wont be like talking to another person... although we will try to make it that way.
neo
ps (If anyone knows how I can get in touch with those damn matrix guys... let me know. I want my name back.)
The word "System Administration" will take on a whole new meaning....
NT Server: You never listen to me! All you do is play quake and read that nerds for news site! How hard would it be to just E-MAIL me once and awhile, huh?
3com switch: Look buddy, you keep me here, locked up in this closet all day.. I get no respect, and all I here is "route route route, all night long, route route route, while I sing this song"...
Linux Server: Now, see here, check out all these graphs of my performance. I just finished that cronjob, balanced out the www sever load, and started the espresso machine. All this BEFORE lunch. Debian 6.3 rules!
Windows 2010: "I can't get no.. do de do, satis-faction, do de do"
Cisco Router: I take the packets in, and put the packets out, and I shake 'em all about.. I do the packet-pokey and I ACL alot, that's what it's all about....
Sun: Does this add-in card make my butt look big?
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