So the system should just have a "Standard Desktop" option that will install all that stuff without the user needing to fiddle over each and every program in the group. You could have a fallback system that would let you install package-by-package if you needed, but I doubt that most users would use it much.
Intel is becoming obsolete. Intel's steadfast opposition to changing their (unbelievably ancient) chip architecture and/or changing their manufacturing processes radically enough to actually innovate is no reason to declare the imminent failure of their competitors.
You heard it first, here on Slashdot: Intel is dying! (Sorry.)
We keep hearing this over and over again, and yet there's always a new technological breakthrough that lets the trend continue.
Agreed, every few years we're supposedly up against limits that will break Moore's Law. I also remember when we finally got 5.25 inch form factor 80 MEGAbyte hard drives. We were supposedly up against the physical limits of electromagnetics, and we couldn't expect any more big improvements. The next step would have to be bubble memory. Besides, nobody needed 80MB of storage anyway.:)
Phoenix is not alone in moving toward such changes. Chip giant Intel has pushed for a predecessor to BIOS it calls the Intel Platform Innovation Framework for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface).
How does one push for a "predecessor" to something? Is that like back to the future? It makes me wonder about the rest of the article.
And no, they're not too dumb to absorb any more information than that, they simply don't have the time.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with both assumptions. I've been in meetings where managers spouted complete nonsense about a project and refused to be corrected or to listen to the truth. They have plenty of time to think up weird *team-building* things that annoy the staff and actually balkanize the department. They have plenty of time to send out pointless emails and travel to offsite meetings so they aren't disturbed by doing their job while they talk about doing their job. I could go on.
People who can, do. People who can't are promoted to management, and I've seen two cases of that in the last month. This is not sour grapes, I have declined promotion above team lead, but I resent being *managed* and evaluated by people who cannot even understand what I do.
Well, if it's not an IT company, there's no reason not to do it. Why deal with having your own IT department, where you might not be able to hire the best people, when you could let someone else, with more infrastructure to deal with that kind of thing, do it?
It depends on the size of the company. What large company does not need IT, even if it is not the main product? From working both sides of the fence, I can say that in-house IT is better for the company. The workers have a vested interest in the company and have a better understanding of the business. Outsourcing is just the latest fad used to generate headlines in the financial news and bonuses for CEOs.
Ok, I'll try to explain it one more time. In chess (like in most sports) there is absolutely no guarantee that the better player (the higher ranking player) will always win.
That's a silly comparison. In most sports, the physical part is paramount, and the mental part is secondary. Chess is almost entirely mental; the only physical aspect is not dozing off or dying from phlebitis before the game is over.
The only way of being absolutely unbeatable is to play perfect chess . ..
Absolutes again. You don't have to be absolutely unbeatable to win/draw, you just have to be as good as your opponent, play the same game, and not make any mistakes.
I don't see it as waste, in fact I think some of the thinking we humans do is of brute-force type, we just don't normally realize it because they are subconcious processes.
Some? Crossword puzzles maybe. When I run into problems, I usually try to remember similar situations and the various outcomes (or at least I think I do). If humans relied on brute-force solutions to play chess, the computers would already be the masters.
That's why expert systems don't work for problems like chess: it's like feeding a general with knowledge of famous battles of the past and expecting him to win every future battle.
I don't like that comparison either. The rules of warfare are myriad and changeable, and the possible environments nearly infinite. The rules of chess are fixed and the battlefield unchangeable. Expert systems are evolving and beginning to live up to some of the decades-old AI hype.
Yes, but very similarly, if you disect/study a living human brain you will only find braincells but no thought.
If you dissect a living human brain, I will have you arrested for murder. Examination of a living brain does show unexplained activity apparently related to "thinking". But all that still does not address your claim that anything that reduces a human's cognitive workload is capable of thinking.
Well, I'm sure we've broken my previous record for ongoing arguments on Slashdot, and it seems we've agreed to disagree. I'd wish you a happy Thanksgiving, but your spelling of "labour" suggests you're a Brit, and the holiday is only for us colonists.:)
No, there is no law requiring companies to make profits.
Exactly what I said. I did read the misleading text, which is why I replied.
Anyone who sold stock early. Some days you're the stool, other days you're the pigeon. Once the company sells the stock, regular Joes like you and me realize gains or losses based on how others perceive their performance to be. Like Fantasy Football, but with real money.
So you're a day trader who doesn't mind if long-term shareholders are being ripped off, and companies are being raided as long as you get your cut. Way to go! You're a real asset.
Let me guess, you got burned. Well, sometimes the market goes down - seen an ad for buggy whips recently?
All mutual fund holders got burned, which includes everybody with 401Ks, which is a heck of a lot of people. Let me guess, you never heard of Enron, WorldCom, Qwest, Northwestern Power, or the lawsuits by shareholders when their stock became worthless or devalued? And yes, they all made buggy whips, so I can really see your point. These are all companies that maximized the return to shareholders and CEOs in the short-term.
Define reasonable. I say 5% annually above inflation. Of course, if I could get 10%, I'd demand that too.
I have never seen any articles of incorporation that require "maximum" return on investment, they generally say reasonable or something similar. If you have citations that prove otherwise, please post them. You can demand whatever return you want you want at the annual shareholder's meeting, but be prepared to be laughed out of the room.
Why not get off your high horse about others' responsibility and make sure you're providing value.
Well, I guess I'm not yet off my "high horse", but I've provided value here by adding some common sense to the nonsense. Does that count?
But if you play chess competatively and want to improve your tactics, there is nothing like playing a lot of games against a strong computer. Honestly.
I'll have to take your word for that. It seems to me that someone who would go 1 in 10,000 with a computer is a masochist, but to each his own.
Even future computers will be beaten by humans (once in a while) as long as they don't play perfect games.
So you say. As long as computers are only just as good as the best human, no human could win. You are correct, as I've stated from the beginning, I don't see the relevance. If some human became capable of playing "perfect" chess, then it would be relevant. Since you continue to point out the incredible complexity of accomplishing this feat, it would seem unlikely that humans will attain it unaided.
They just don't work for chess because of the complexity involved. Every strong playing chess program we know is type A (brute force) based.
I would think that someone who believes computers can think would see the waste in brute force solutions and be able to imagine the future of expert systems. There is little new to learn in brute force attacks, aside from polishing some algorithms perhaps. As computers become ever faster, it becomes feasible to attack more problems (like encryption) with brute force, but not the *human* type problems.
So why isn't it fair to say that computers do actually think, when they reduce the human cognitive workload?
In earlier years, I built a calculator and a computer from scratch using wire-wrap, so I can attest that a calculator is nothing more than an electronic abacus or slide rule, and a computer is nothing more than a fancy calculator. An abacus reduces "human cognitive workload". Does it think? A slide rule is even better since you can do quick approximations that you can't do on a calculator or even a computer. Does it think? I don't believe it does, even though it reduces my cognitive workload.
I'm not dogmatic at all. Theoretical limits are not dogmas:)
There is more than one definition of "dogmatic".:)
It is the duty of any US company, given this countries business and accounting laws, to provide the highest return possible to the shareholders.
I don't recall seeing that law. Who benefits if there are high short-term profits, but the company fails after alienating its customers? It certainly doesn't help the long-term shareholders when their stock becomes worthless. Companies have a responsibility to provide a reasonable return and long-term growth for their shareholders.
My favorite was the instructions that came with an add-on card. They started with, "You are pleased to purchase this product . .." As you say, they went downhill from there.:)
Bearing in mind that the Boston Tea Party was a protest by tea smugglers against the lifting of taxes on tea imports by the British, I imagine American history will record the SCO fiasco as a triumph of one man's will against hordes of unwashed code thieves.
I think that's a somewhat revisionist view of history. The Boston Tea Party was the result of a grass roots opposition to the East India Company's attempt to sell products below costs - the first recorded instance of product dumping in America.
IIRC, the problem was missing strawberries, not ice cream. The thing that always bothered me was that the reconstruction during the trial was done using sugar or something with fine granularity that in no way related to something really chunky like strawberries, but nobody in the film objected to the obvious mismatch. Just over-analyzing the problem, I suppose.
So even if computers beat us 99.99% of the time because they can draw us into complex tactical positions; it's mostly the 0.01% that counts, because those are the highly strategical games that hint at perfect chess.
Back to one of my earlier points: How many people will be willing to play 10,000 ("99.99%" *ahem* your numbers) games against a computer to win one (and how many years would it take to play them)? As a fair but untalented chess player, I can say not many. As I pointed out in the OP, when I could no longer beat Chessmaster on the highest level, I devoted my time to other interests.
A perfect game in chess is when you lead your opponent to defeat without ever giving him any chance of escape in the least number of moves possible. I think that's what the confusion is about: in chess "perfect" is defined as absolute perfection, not just being better then everybody/everything else.
Yet again, that is not relevant to the comment I posted. Humans (obviously) do not play "perfect" chess, so computer programs do not need to do so either in order to prevent humans from winning. An expert system *taught* (I'm using the term loosely) from the best games of the best players would play like the best masters without the human lapses. It would be like putting a dictionary program in a spelling bee, and that, I believe, is where we are headed.
I believe computers do think (in some very limited way); but that's a philosophical debate, and if we can't have consensus on the definition of "thinking" the debate becomes meaningless.
What constitutes "thinking" has been an ongoing philosophical debate for millennia. I hardly expect to reach consensus in a Slashdot thread. I write programs because it's my occupation and avocation. Some are simple, and some are sophisticated, but I don't have the hubris to believe I've caused any machine to think.
I'm not complaining, I'm just trying not to let my discordian side take over . ..
A dogmatic discordian. Now there's a mind-bender.:)
Sigh. You don't need to store all positions, you need to compute them all. Since these computations take more than 10 billion times as long as the universe has existed, it would be very practical to store those positions so you don't have to compute them all over again (during your next move).
Are you having a nice argument with yourself? You don't need to store all positions, you just need to store them so you don't have to compute them again every move?
If you want to attack my estimate, make a better one using published numbers, don't just bullshit around because I don't buy that.
Look, you are the one talking about the need to compute and store every possible position. From the start, my position has been that your method is not necessary, not that your numbers are incorrect for someone who is deranged enough to try to implement your method. To restate, yet again, it will take only an incremental improvement in current chess programs before humans can no longer beat them.
You don't believe it's impossible to play perfect chess, read back your own comments (it's the one where you get religious).
You don't understand sarcasm. It was your pontificating statement that "We know that it's impossible . .." that drew my response. I don't know any such thing, so don't include me. I don't know that it is impossible to build an expert system that could play a perfect game. If that led you to believe I was arguing about "perfect" chess, I apologize. As I stated, in the same post, I did not understand what your disjointed complaint was. My point all along has been that just because a computer program does not lose to humans, it does not mean the machine can think, and I'm tired of repeating it. (And someone who styles himself as the Grand Poobah shouldn't complain about people getting religious.:)
Look, it's not my numbers, my part is making an optimistic assumption of hardware capable of computing 10 billion positions per second. With these conservative estimates and optimistic assumptions it's still impossible.
They are your numbers since you are using them to bolster your argument. I believe your numbers are irrelevant since I don't believe there is any need to store all possible positions.
Remember we're talking about playing perfect games . ..
Whoa, Lone Ranger, who is this "we"? You are the one going on and on about perfect games. I'm talking about programs that are *good enough*, and we are nearly there.
. . . we don't have to care about how the human brain produces intelligence (even though it could prove a good starting point).
I thought we were arguing about thinking machines, but I could be wrong. The point seems to change constantly.
If we combined those two concepts, we would have something that duplicates "game intelligence" in humans quite well (except for being awfully slow). Would this be a thinking machine by your standards?
ANNs have been capable of producing generalized responses from previous *experience* for years, and that has been termed "learning" by some. To answer your loaded question, a smarter person than I suggested that thinking was the arbitration that happened between multiple types of intelligence, so given your conditions, I'd say the machine was intelligent. Since there was only one type of intelligence, it would not be a thinking machine. My preferred answer is that a thinking machine, like pornography, is very difficult to define. I'll know it when I see it.
What? Are you serious? 31688800000000000000000000 years? You just haven't got a notion about big numbers, do you?
You just have a reading comprehension problem, don't you. I don't believe your pessimistic predictions will stand the test of time, nor do I really care how big your numbers are. There are only a few humans left who can beat the current chess-playing programs. It seems apparent that it won't take much improvement in those programs to eliminate humans from contention.
Aha, finally the big word is out. To you, even if a machine "mimics" intelligent behaviour perfectly, it's still a machine, so it can't be intelligent. Do you think human intuition is something special in that it is not determined by rules / laws of nature? What do you think is it that makes the processing in the brain so special a computer can't do it?
A bullsnake mimics a rattlesnake, but it's still a bullsnake. The cargo cult could not build an airplane, but they could mimic one well enough to lure victims. If you don't understand how something works, you can not duplicate it, although you can produce something that resembles it. Listen up. I did not say there would never be a thinking or intelligent machine. I don't have that absolutist certitude. I said that just because humans can't beat a chess program, it doesn't mean the machine can think.
Non sequitur. Why do you think people still get on bikes and have races 2000 miles long, considering they know it's allmost impossible to beat someone on a motorbike?
Poor analogy; a better one would be racing against a robot on a bicycle. While there are mental elements to bicycle racing, it is really a physical sport. Chess is not.
Ha ha, I love sarcasm; except what I'm telling is the truth, and the estimate I give about the possible positions in chess is a conservative one (Shannon estimates . ..
And if one eliminates all losing positions and all positions that emanate from losing positions . . . but I'm not arguing about your numbers - it's your absolutist certitude that amuses me. You aren't the first one to claim that something can't be done and use numbers to back it up. At one time it was known that trains could never travel faster than 60 mph, with all the relevant physics explained.
you can never store all of those positions in any kind of memory (because you would need the whole universe and then some as memory); and it will take a very long time to compute those positions.
Who says that you have to store all possible positions? You're talking about brute-force programs at the lowest possible level. And if it takes a very long time to compute positions, so what? I've programmed brute-force solutions on some problems in the past, and the computer doesn't care one way or the other, although a human opponent might die of old age in the interim during a chess match.
Sigh. . . what kind of thinking and intelligence are you exactly talking about (there are at least 8)?
Yes, I've read the literature, thanks, and that's one author's proposition. I'm saying the main thrust of the unfortunately ill-named AI area is not thinking at all but mimicry of the human decision-making process.
I'm trying to say that you underestimate humans in what they're willing to endure to get better at their sport; that you grossly underestimate the difficulties of chess and overestimate the processor power available to us; and finally that in humans there is no intelligence without thinking, so why doesn't a machine that shows intelligent behaviour think in some way?
I am not the one underestimating humans. Indeed, I'm saying humans will soon demonstrate their ability to write a computer program that will not lose a chess game to any human. That does not make the computer intelligent or thinking. It is still a machine that will always follow the same rote instructions without intuition. It is the difference between mimicry and the real thing.
Fritz lost the third game to Kasparov because there was a heuristic programmed into it not to push pawns that protect the king, while Kasparov had chosen an opening that resulted in a position where Fritz' only hope in the long term was to do exactly that. Fritz had not enough processor power to look that far into the game, and Kasparov knew it.
Thanks for the information on how Fritz was programmed and for reading Kasparov's mind. Handy talents you have there.
The point is to create machines that play chess better than humans do now, so humans can learn from them and get new insights about the game.
You could be right, but once computers can beat the best of the grand masters, I really doubt you'll see many people interested in gaining chess "insights" from a machine (or in playing chess). It's like gaining insights about how cell K7 relates to cell B4 in a spreadsheet.
We know that it's impossible to play perfect chess . ..
Thank you God. I have always asked You for a message, and now You have answered . . . but I was really hoping for the secret to the universe or a really great stock tip.
Yeah, the classical AI bait 'n switch. First it's really intelligent to play a nice game of chess or do complicated mathematical equations, but as soon as computers can do it it's no longer thinking. The solution would be to sit down and define what thinking exactly is, except nobody has ever succeeded in doing just that.
I was fully functional when the term "Artificial Intelligence" was coined. I think I'm well-versed in what it doesn't mean. AI was never intended to indicate that machines could think. If you have sources to indicate otherwise, I would truly appreciate a link for my ongoing education. If you can't explain what thinking is, then you really shouldn't complain if I suggest machines using rule-based programs don't think.
Yeah, but at the same time no one has written a chess program that cannot lose against a human. Humans still play better chess than computers do, even though the difference between them is getting smaller.
So, you reiterate my point: it's a matter of degree and processor power. You seem to be all bristly and frothy about my comment, but what are you trying to say?
Personally, i think HP is counting on non-technical word of mouth and goodwill, which is why all these ads focus on things like preserving artwork and capturing criminals- if your other managers like the HP ads, they're more likely to approve HP-related spending... and think that it's worth it, even if they don't understand the product or the language describing it.
Personally, I think Carly has dismantled just about everything that made HP a good, solid company, and now she needs a new buzzword to get the stock price up and make her stock options profitable.
Slashdot Mirror
So the system should just have a "Standard Desktop" option that will install all that stuff without the user needing to fiddle over each and every program in the group. You could have a fallback system that would let you install package-by-package if you needed, but I doubt that most users would use it much.
I believe it's called Mandrake. :)
Intel is becoming obsolete. Intel's steadfast opposition to changing their (unbelievably ancient) chip architecture and/or changing their manufacturing processes radically enough to actually innovate is no reason to declare the imminent failure of their competitors.
You heard it first, here on Slashdot: Intel is dying! (Sorry.)
(BTW, why are we worried about AI when our I is suspect in the first place?)
Because *we* are the "I" attempting to create the "AI". That worries me.
We keep hearing this over and over again, and yet there's always a new technological breakthrough that lets the trend continue.
Agreed, every few years we're supposedly up against limits that will break Moore's Law. I also remember when we finally got 5.25 inch form factor 80 MEGAbyte hard drives. We were supposedly up against the physical limits of electromagnetics, and we couldn't expect any more big improvements. The next step would have to be bubble memory. Besides, nobody needed 80MB of storage anyway. :)
Phoenix is not alone in moving toward such changes. Chip giant Intel has pushed for a predecessor to BIOS it calls the Intel Platform Innovation Framework for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface).
How does one push for a "predecessor" to something? Is that like back to the future? It makes me wonder about the rest of the article.
All too true. If I hadn't already posted here, that would get a +Insightful.
And no, they're not too dumb to absorb any more information than that, they simply don't have the time.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with both assumptions. I've been in meetings where managers spouted complete nonsense about a project and refused to be corrected or to listen to the truth. They have plenty of time to think up weird *team-building* things that annoy the staff and actually balkanize the department. They have plenty of time to send out pointless emails and travel to offsite meetings so they aren't disturbed by doing their job while they talk about doing their job. I could go on.
People who can, do. People who can't are promoted to management, and I've seen two cases of that in the last month. This is not sour grapes, I have declined promotion above team lead, but I resent being *managed* and evaluated by people who cannot even understand what I do.
Well, if it's not an IT company, there's no reason not to do it. Why deal with having your own IT department, where you might not be able to hire the best people, when you could let someone else, with more infrastructure to deal with that kind of thing, do it?
It depends on the size of the company. What large company does not need IT, even if it is not the main product? From working both sides of the fence, I can say that in-house IT is better for the company. The workers have a vested interest in the company and have a better understanding of the business. Outsourcing is just the latest fad used to generate headlines in the financial news and bonuses for CEOs.
Just add an arrow and a box that says "Stock Options Become Profitable". They'll be all over it.
Ok, I'll try to explain it one more time. In chess (like in most sports) there is absolutely no guarantee that the better player (the higher ranking player) will always win.
That's a silly comparison. In most sports, the physical part is paramount, and the mental part is secondary. Chess is almost entirely mental; the only physical aspect is not dozing off or dying from phlebitis before the game is over.
The only way of being absolutely unbeatable is to play perfect chess . . .
Absolutes again. You don't have to be absolutely unbeatable to win/draw, you just have to be as good as your opponent, play the same game, and not make any mistakes.
I don't see it as waste, in fact I think some of the thinking we humans do is of brute-force type, we just don't normally realize it because they are subconcious processes.
Some? Crossword puzzles maybe. When I run into problems, I usually try to remember similar situations and the various outcomes (or at least I think I do). If humans relied on brute-force solutions to play chess, the computers would already be the masters.
That's why expert systems don't work for problems like chess: it's like feeding a general with knowledge of famous battles of the past and expecting him to win every future battle.
I don't like that comparison either. The rules of warfare are myriad and changeable, and the possible environments nearly infinite. The rules of chess are fixed and the battlefield unchangeable. Expert systems are evolving and beginning to live up to some of the decades-old AI hype.
Yes, but very similarly, if you disect/study a living human brain you will only find braincells but no thought.
If you dissect a living human brain, I will have you arrested for murder. Examination of a living brain does show unexplained activity apparently related to "thinking". But all that still does not address your claim that anything that reduces a human's cognitive workload is capable of thinking.
Well, I'm sure we've broken my previous record for ongoing arguments on Slashdot, and it seems we've agreed to disagree. I'd wish you a happy Thanksgiving, but your spelling of "labour" suggests you're a Brit, and the holiday is only for us colonists. :)
No, there is no law requiring companies to make profits.
Exactly what I said. I did read the misleading text, which is why I replied.
Anyone who sold stock early. Some days you're the stool, other days you're the pigeon. Once the company sells the stock, regular Joes like you and me realize gains or losses based on how others perceive their performance to be. Like Fantasy Football, but with real money.
So you're a day trader who doesn't mind if long-term shareholders are being ripped off, and companies are being raided as long as you get your cut. Way to go! You're a real asset.
Let me guess, you got burned. Well, sometimes the market goes down - seen an ad for buggy whips recently?
All mutual fund holders got burned, which includes everybody with 401Ks, which is a heck of a lot of people. Let me guess, you never heard of Enron, WorldCom, Qwest, Northwestern Power, or the lawsuits by shareholders when their stock became worthless or devalued? And yes, they all made buggy whips, so I can really see your point. These are all companies that maximized the return to shareholders and CEOs in the short-term.
Define reasonable. I say 5% annually above inflation. Of course, if I could get 10%, I'd demand that too.
I have never seen any articles of incorporation that require "maximum" return on investment, they generally say reasonable or something similar. If you have citations that prove otherwise, please post them. You can demand whatever return you want you want at the annual shareholder's meeting, but be prepared to be laughed out of the room.
Why not get off your high horse about others' responsibility and make sure you're providing value.
Well, I guess I'm not yet off my "high horse", but I've provided value here by adding some common sense to the nonsense. Does that count?
But if you play chess competatively and want to improve your tactics, there is nothing like playing a lot of games against a strong computer. Honestly.
I'll have to take your word for that. It seems to me that someone who would go 1 in 10,000 with a computer is a masochist, but to each his own.
Even future computers will be beaten by humans (once in a while) as long as they don't play perfect games.
So you say. As long as computers are only just as good as the best human, no human could win. You are correct, as I've stated from the beginning, I don't see the relevance. If some human became capable of playing "perfect" chess, then it would be relevant. Since you continue to point out the incredible complexity of accomplishing this feat, it would seem unlikely that humans will attain it unaided.
They just don't work for chess because of the complexity involved. Every strong playing chess program we know is type A (brute force) based.
I would think that someone who believes computers can think would see the waste in brute force solutions and be able to imagine the future of expert systems. There is little new to learn in brute force attacks, aside from polishing some algorithms perhaps. As computers become ever faster, it becomes feasible to attack more problems (like encryption) with brute force, but not the *human* type problems.
So why isn't it fair to say that computers do actually think, when they reduce the human cognitive workload?
In earlier years, I built a calculator and a computer from scratch using wire-wrap, so I can attest that a calculator is nothing more than an electronic abacus or slide rule, and a computer is nothing more than a fancy calculator. An abacus reduces "human cognitive workload". Does it think? A slide rule is even better since you can do quick approximations that you can't do on a calculator or even a computer. Does it think? I don't believe it does, even though it reduces my cognitive workload.
I'm not dogmatic at all. Theoretical limits are not dogmas :)
There is more than one definition of "dogmatic". :)
It is the duty of any US company, given this countries business and accounting laws, to provide the highest return possible to the shareholders.
I don't recall seeing that law. Who benefits if there are high short-term profits, but the company fails after alienating its customers? It certainly doesn't help the long-term shareholders when their stock becomes worthless. Companies have a responsibility to provide a reasonable return and long-term growth for their shareholders.
My favorite was the instructions that came with an add-on card. They started with, "You are pleased to purchase this product . . ." As you say, they went downhill from there. :)
Bearing in mind that the Boston Tea Party was a protest by tea smugglers against the lifting of taxes on tea imports by the British, I imagine American history will record the SCO fiasco as a triumph of one man's will against hordes of unwashed code thieves.
I think that's a somewhat revisionist view of history. The Boston Tea Party was the result of a grass roots opposition to the East India Company's attempt to sell products below costs - the first recorded instance of product dumping in America.
IIRC, the problem was missing strawberries, not ice cream. The thing that always bothered me was that the reconstruction during the trial was done using sugar or something with fine granularity that in no way related to something really chunky like strawberries, but nobody in the film objected to the obvious mismatch. Just over-analyzing the problem, I suppose.
So even if computers beat us 99.99% of the time because they can draw us into complex tactical positions; it's mostly the 0.01% that counts, because those are the highly strategical games that hint at perfect chess.
Back to one of my earlier points: How many people will be willing to play 10,000 ("99.99%" *ahem* your numbers) games against a computer to win one (and how many years would it take to play them)? As a fair but untalented chess player, I can say not many. As I pointed out in the OP, when I could no longer beat Chessmaster on the highest level, I devoted my time to other interests.
A perfect game in chess is when you lead your opponent to defeat without ever giving him any chance of escape in the least number of moves possible. I think that's what the confusion is about: in chess "perfect" is defined as absolute perfection, not just being better then everybody/everything else.
Yet again, that is not relevant to the comment I posted. Humans (obviously) do not play "perfect" chess, so computer programs do not need to do so either in order to prevent humans from winning. An expert system *taught* (I'm using the term loosely) from the best games of the best players would play like the best masters without the human lapses. It would be like putting a dictionary program in a spelling bee, and that, I believe, is where we are headed.
I believe computers do think (in some very limited way); but that's a philosophical debate, and if we can't have consensus on the definition of "thinking" the debate becomes meaningless.
What constitutes "thinking" has been an ongoing philosophical debate for millennia. I hardly expect to reach consensus in a Slashdot thread. I write programs because it's my occupation and avocation. Some are simple, and some are sophisticated, but I don't have the hubris to believe I've caused any machine to think.
I'm not complaining, I'm just trying not to let my discordian side take over . . .
A dogmatic discordian. Now there's a mind-bender. :)
Excellent points, especially about people being territorial.
Sigh. You don't need to store all positions, you need to compute them all. Since these computations take more than 10 billion times as long as the universe has existed, it would be very practical to store those positions so you don't have to compute them all over again (during your next move).
Are you having a nice argument with yourself? You don't need to store all positions, you just need to store them so you don't have to compute them again every move?
If you want to attack my estimate, make a better one using published numbers, don't just bullshit around because I don't buy that.
Look, you are the one talking about the need to compute and store every possible position. From the start, my position has been that your method is not necessary, not that your numbers are incorrect for someone who is deranged enough to try to implement your method. To restate, yet again, it will take only an incremental improvement in current chess programs before humans can no longer beat them.
You don't believe it's impossible to play perfect chess, read back your own comments (it's the one where you get religious).
You don't understand sarcasm. It was your pontificating statement that "We know that it's impossible . . ." that drew my response. I don't know any such thing, so don't include me. I don't know that it is impossible to build an expert system that could play a perfect game. If that led you to believe I was arguing about "perfect" chess, I apologize. As I stated, in the same post, I did not understand what your disjointed complaint was. My point all along has been that just because a computer program does not lose to humans, it does not mean the machine can think, and I'm tired of repeating it. (And someone who styles himself as the Grand Poobah shouldn't complain about people getting religious. :)
Driving the wrong way up a one way street, no pants, whacking off to kiddie porn?
Sheesh. Didn't you even read the synopsis? It said he was caught "laptop in hand". :)
Look, it's not my numbers, my part is making an optimistic assumption of hardware capable of computing 10 billion positions per second. With these conservative estimates and optimistic assumptions it's still impossible.
They are your numbers since you are using them to bolster your argument. I believe your numbers are irrelevant since I don't believe there is any need to store all possible positions.
Remember we're talking about playing perfect games . . .
Whoa, Lone Ranger, who is this "we"? You are the one going on and on about perfect games. I'm talking about programs that are *good enough*, and we are nearly there.
. . . we don't have to care about how the human brain produces intelligence (even though it could prove a good starting point).
I thought we were arguing about thinking machines, but I could be wrong. The point seems to change constantly.
If we combined those two concepts, we would have something that duplicates "game intelligence" in humans quite well (except for being awfully slow). Would this be a thinking machine by your standards?
ANNs have been capable of producing generalized responses from previous *experience* for years, and that has been termed "learning" by some. To answer your loaded question, a smarter person than I suggested that thinking was the arbitration that happened between multiple types of intelligence, so given your conditions, I'd say the machine was intelligent. Since there was only one type of intelligence, it would not be a thinking machine. My preferred answer is that a thinking machine, like pornography, is very difficult to define. I'll know it when I see it.
What? Are you serious? 31688800000000000000000000 years? You just haven't got a notion about big numbers, do you?
You just have a reading comprehension problem, don't you. I don't believe your pessimistic predictions will stand the test of time, nor do I really care how big your numbers are. There are only a few humans left who can beat the current chess-playing programs. It seems apparent that it won't take much improvement in those programs to eliminate humans from contention.
Aha, finally the big word is out. To you, even if a machine "mimics" intelligent behaviour perfectly, it's still a machine, so it can't be intelligent. Do you think human intuition is something special in that it is not determined by rules / laws of nature? What do you think is it that makes the processing in the brain so special a computer can't do it?
A bullsnake mimics a rattlesnake, but it's still a bullsnake. The cargo cult could not build an airplane, but they could mimic one well enough to lure victims. If you don't understand how something works, you can not duplicate it, although you can produce something that resembles it. Listen up. I did not say there would never be a thinking or intelligent machine. I don't have that absolutist certitude. I said that just because humans can't beat a chess program, it doesn't mean the machine can think.
Non sequitur. Why do you think people still get on bikes and have races 2000 miles long, considering they know it's allmost impossible to beat someone on a motorbike?
Poor analogy; a better one would be racing against a robot on a bicycle. While there are mental elements to bicycle racing, it is really a physical sport. Chess is not.
Ha ha, I love sarcasm; except what I'm telling is the truth, and the estimate I give about the possible positions in chess is a conservative one (Shannon estimates . . .
And if one eliminates all losing positions and all positions that emanate from losing positions . . . but I'm not arguing about your numbers - it's your absolutist certitude that amuses me. You aren't the first one to claim that something can't be done and use numbers to back it up. At one time it was known that trains could never travel faster than 60 mph, with all the relevant physics explained.
you can never store all of those positions in any kind of memory (because you would need the whole universe and then some as memory); and it will take a very long time to compute those positions.
Who says that you have to store all possible positions? You're talking about brute-force programs at the lowest possible level. And if it takes a very long time to compute positions, so what? I've programmed brute-force solutions on some problems in the past, and the computer doesn't care one way or the other, although a human opponent might die of old age in the interim during a chess match.
Sigh. . . what kind of thinking and intelligence are you exactly talking about (there are at least 8)?
Yes, I've read the literature, thanks, and that's one author's proposition. I'm saying the main thrust of the unfortunately ill-named AI area is not thinking at all but mimicry of the human decision-making process.
I'm trying to say that you underestimate humans in what they're willing to endure to get better at their sport; that you grossly underestimate the difficulties of chess and overestimate the processor power available to us; and finally that in humans there is no intelligence without thinking, so why doesn't a machine that shows intelligent behaviour think in some way?
I am not the one underestimating humans. Indeed, I'm saying humans will soon demonstrate their ability to write a computer program that will not lose a chess game to any human. That does not make the computer intelligent or thinking. It is still a machine that will always follow the same rote instructions without intuition. It is the difference between mimicry and the real thing.
Fritz lost the third game to Kasparov because there was a heuristic programmed into it not to push pawns that protect the king, while Kasparov had chosen an opening that resulted in a position where Fritz' only hope in the long term was to do exactly that. Fritz had not enough processor power to look that far into the game, and Kasparov knew it.
Thanks for the information on how Fritz was programmed and for reading Kasparov's mind. Handy talents you have there.
The point is to create machines that play chess better than humans do now, so humans can learn from them and get new insights about the game.
You could be right, but once computers can beat the best of the grand masters, I really doubt you'll see many people interested in gaining chess "insights" from a machine (or in playing chess). It's like gaining insights about how cell K7 relates to cell B4 in a spreadsheet.
We know that it's impossible to play perfect chess . . .
Thank you God. I have always asked You for a message, and now You have answered . . . but I was really hoping for the secret to the universe or a really great stock tip.
Yeah, the classical AI bait 'n switch. First it's really intelligent to play a nice game of chess or do complicated mathematical equations, but as soon as computers can do it it's no longer thinking. The solution would be to sit down and define what thinking exactly is, except nobody has ever succeeded in doing just that.
I was fully functional when the term "Artificial Intelligence" was coined. I think I'm well-versed in what it doesn't mean. AI was never intended to indicate that machines could think. If you have sources to indicate otherwise, I would truly appreciate a link for my ongoing education. If you can't explain what thinking is, then you really shouldn't complain if I suggest machines using rule-based programs don't think.
Yeah, but at the same time no one has written a chess program that cannot lose against a human. Humans still play better chess than computers do, even though the difference between them is getting smaller.
So, you reiterate my point: it's a matter of degree and processor power. You seem to be all bristly and frothy about my comment, but what are you trying to say?
Personally, i think HP is counting on non-technical word of mouth and goodwill, which is why all these ads focus on things like preserving artwork and capturing criminals- if your other managers like the HP ads, they're more likely to approve HP-related spending... and think that it's worth it, even if they don't understand the product or the language describing it.
Personally, I think Carly has dismantled just about everything that made HP a good, solid company, and now she needs a new buzzword to get the stock price up and make her stock options profitable.