Americans are basically cheap. I'm always amused by the people who will spend $10 in gas to drive to four different stores to try to save $5 on some item. Or spend 40 hours on the internet to save $25 on plane tickets. I understand wasting $10 in gas to save $5 is ridiculous, but I think it is sensical to spend a lot of time to save money. Basically, you always have a salary of 24 hours in a day, but you may or may not make money. You have a guaranteed amount of time, but you never have a guaranteed amount of money. So if you have the time, spend it surfing for a better plan fare, or browsing the Sunday ads. You will get more hours later, but you may get fired tomorrow.
Of course, you need to decide how much time you want to spend on economic things anyway, as opposed to socializing and entertainment, but if you have extra hours in your business time budget, spend it looking to save money.
I guess at this point it's a matter of definitions, but I would still say we don't have the device yet. You were right; I was wrong; we do have 'Turing-Plus' devices. However, we don't know *yet* what specific Turing-plus device can give of the behavior of the human brain. We can hook up cameras and thermometers to Turing machines, but somehow we haven't yet come up with AI. And I suspect that a Turing-plus device may not even be what gives us AI. I think we might get a device that can solve strong AI problems that contains *no* Turing machine. But, i also do believe that the human machine contains at least one Turing machine, so a complete re-creating of the mind would contain a Turing machine.
Actually, we have quite a lot of them. You probably have several in your home. Can you give me a few examples? Are they ones that depend on input from human beings?
Gödel's theorems have nothing to do with representing the human mind in any form. Godel disagrees with you:
One of the earliest attempts to use incompleteness to reason about human intelligence was by Gödel himself in his 1951 Gibbs lecture entitled "Some basic theorems on the foundations of mathematics and their philosophical implications".[1] In this lecture, Gödel uses the incompleteness theorem to arrive at the following disjunction: (a) the human mind is not a consistent finite machine, or (b) there exist Diophantine equations for which it cannot decide whether solutions exist. Gödel finds (b) implausible, and thus seems to have believed the human mind was not equivalent to a finite machine, i.e., its power exceeded that of any finite machine. He recognized that this was only a conjecture, since one could never disprove (b). Yet he considered the disjunctive conclusion to be a "certain fact". [Emphasis mine]
I don't really understand the math beyond a metaphorical level. I don't really understand what completeness or inconsistency is. I don't think it matters that the human mind may or may not be complete or consistent. The point, as I understand it, is that a human mind is able to see the proof that a system cannot both be consistent and complete, whereas a Turing machine would never be able to demonstrate that.
However, referencing Gödel's incompleteness theorems just because they sound appropriate at first glance does not give any argument scientific credibility. Similarly, referencing a book about Goedel's theorem just because is might be relevant has no scientific. I have no reason to believe Torkel Franzen over J. R. Lucas or Goedel himself. It all depends on the details of their arguments. In this case, Lucas is more convincing to me. A human being can 'understand' that a Turing machine can never understand certain things. It doesn't matter that a human can't necessarily understand those things either; all that matters is that a human can understand that a Turing machine can't understand something, which is a feat that the Turing machine can't do.
You are right, but my point is that far and away, what our visual system evolved to perceive were complex, non-geometric systems, such as cloud formations, or where the 'path' is as it wanders from the forest to the open field.
I think if what you were saying is true, we would have good computer vision, because we have a lot of powerful math for dealing with triangles, circles, and squares, and really powerful computers that can do that math. However, basic recognition tasks have still not been done by computers.
No tree looks like a triangle. From any angle, they have a cloudy, amorphous, fractal structure. There aren't any 'points' in the shadow, nor even straight lines. You can't understand clouds using classical geometry. You can't know anything about a river from it's shape using geometry -- you need fluid dynamics modeling.
A triangle doesn't need to be perfect in order for you to recognise it as a triangle. It just needs three pointy bits, and there are plenty of objects like that in nature. A "mathematical" triangle with straight edges is just a special case of a "natural" triangle. I'd like to see the computer program that can look at a tree's shadow and call it a 'triangle'. Hell, I'd like to see the computer program that can pick a shadow out of the grass!
No - it doesn't have to mean that at all. Unfortunately, for our present situation, it does.
There may be other ways - or many other ways - to solve these problems that do not use the same mechanisms that human physiology does. That's probably true, but right now, we have only *one* way to emulate intelligence -- the Turing machine. So unless the Turing machine is basically a mind ( and I argue that Goedel showed that it is not ), then we have to build a new kind of device. It doesn't matter whether this other device is the same kind of thing as a human mind or not -- right now we don't have anything other than a Turing machine, so we have to build a new kind of device if we want some of the behavior that a Turing machine is incapable of.
Yes, we're talking about it because I brought it up, but the reason it's relevant is because it demonstrates that humans can do something that Turing machines ( read: computers ) cannot. Otherwise, why talk about Goedel's theorem? We could talk about any theorem whatsoever. There's no point in talking about theorems, Goedels or not, and AI, unless it tells us something we didn't know before.
Which isn't really all that deep of a statement. It may not be deep, but it does have serious implications for AI and computers. It means that if you want to have a conversation with a computer, or have true face recognition, or solve any hard-AI problem, we have to invent a new type of machine first. We don't have any computing device that's *not* completely a Turing machine. We don't have any 'Turing-Plus' devices; they're all only Turing machines, through and through. And if the mind is not a Turing machine, than nothing we have today, nor anything we could build tomorrow with our current understanding, could ever solve a hard-AI problem, not matter how powerful it is.
As you noted, Turing machines can also prove Godel's theorem. I thought the deal was that they couldn't... otherwise, why would we be talking about Goedel's theorem, Turing machine, and the mind?
The question is, how do you know this to be the case? On the one hand, science generally takes the position that we really don't know how the mind operates, and on the other some people -- you, in this case -- claim that they are able to classify how it works, which seems... unsubstantiated. I'm not claiming that I know how the mind works, I'm only claiming that the mind is *not* a Turing machine, based on my rudimentary understanding of Goedel's incompleteness theorem. I can't say what it is, but I can say one thing that it is not.
Most everything is made up for basic shapes. Some of those shapes may only be described by mathematics like for example, circles, triangles, squares etc. Now you just have to save how those shapes fit together to make a bigger shape but a shape in 3 dimensions. This is not true. If you buy the theory that humans originated in Africa, and developed our minds in order to survive on the savannah, then seeing circles, triangles, and squares is a useless ability.
Imagine this picture: The sky, with two different cloud types merging into one another. Below that, the tree-line, with 200 different species of trees in it. Below that, the underbrush, with 1,000 different plant speicies in it. Below that, winding river. This is the type of image that the human mind has to process. What time is it? How dark is the sky? Will it be night soon? Will it rain tonight? How many hours do I have before the sun sets, or before it rains?
Are there any edible trees in the tree-line there? Are there any camouflaged panthers hiding in the branches, waiting to drop on me? Are there any edible plants in the underbrush? Are there any camouflaged rabbits in there that I might kill?
How fast is that river going? How deep is it? How cold is it? Is it potable? Are there fish or crustaceans in it?
In order to survive in that environment, the human mind needs a complex, fuzzy-matching, fractal processing ability. Human beings never saw a square or triangle until the first cities were built, about 12-15,000 years ago.
Your implication is that the human mind cannot be reduced to a Turing machine. I am in the other camp--who believe that the mind is subject to rigorous physical law, and that physical law can be expressed arithmetically (in principle), and so the human mind is a Turing machine.
I'm not saying that the mind is not subject to physical law, or is not based on math. All I'm saying is that the mind is not a Turing machine ( though it probably would have to have a Turing machine in it somewhere ). It's a different *kind* of machine, not a super-powerful Turing machine.
Goedel basically showed that a Turing machine cannot do *all* the kinds of math that a human mind can do ( though it can do some). Not that a Turing machine lacks a certain amount of power, but just that it never will. It's just quantitavely the wrong tool for the job. It doesn't matter how much power you give it; the 'weakest' Turing machine is essentially the same as the 'strongest' one; it just simply can't do certain things. If a human is able to perceive and understand this, to know something that a Turing machine can't know, then the mind cannot *solely* be a Turing machine.
This does not mean that the mind is not a different *kind* of machine, based on physical law, instead of some mystic hocus-pocus; it's just that it's not a Turing machine. My claim is that the mind is a qualitatively different kind of machine, not a Turing machine.
Goedel's theorem says that a consistent arithmetic system will contain unprovable truths. Put otherwise, such a system cannot be both consistent and complete. Thus the Goedel counterargument to Strong AI (that human minds and computers are not fundamentally different) is that humans (e.g. mathematicians) can prove things like Godel's theorem, so we are able to "rise above" the arithmetic and exist in states of full proof and full consistency.
But I think there is a flaw in that logic (note: I am not a mathematician). The theorem doesn't preclude that a given arithmetic system (e.g. human mind) will be able to prove a truth that a weaker system ignored. Thus our ability to see certain truths doesn't mean that there are not other truths that are unprovable to us.
I don't think the implication of Goedel's theorem shows that we 'rise above' the Turing machine, but rather that we have a qualitatively different awareness or knowledge that a Turing machine doesn't have.
Goedel's theorem is recursive. Any human mathematician can see that no matter how powerful the symbolic system is, the Turing machine will never be complete; there will be truths that the system can't prove. No matter how much you expand a particular system to show any truth a weaker system missed, there will be more truths that the newer, more powerful system missed. This process can go on ad naseum into infinity. A human mind can perceive this foray into eternity, but the Turing machine has no way of proving it. How could a human mind perceive something that a Turing machine couldn't, unless we had some component that was fundamentally different than a Turing machine?
What we seem to have that the Turing machine doesn't is meta-knowledge. We can see that any attempt to create a complete and consistent arithmetic system on a Turing machine will just lead to an endless series of more powerful systems that produce ever more elusive truths, and the process never ends. In this sense the Turing machine is 'myopic' -- it will never stop and say "Hey, I'm not getting anywhere with this; this is an infinite loop. No matter how powerful the system is, there will always be more truths that it cannot express." It's unable to know what it can't know, so to speak. However, as humans, we can somehow see the 'big picture', that no matter how powerful a system you make, there will always be another level of truths out there.
More fundamentally, no one has actually shown that the human mind is either consistent or complete (proving both would be required to sh
No. I'm not. There are robotic vacuums and lawnmowers right now. Yes, but those things don't have any
'thoughts' or 'ideas' of any kind of mental activity about what is carpet, hardwood floor, or grass, or what is clean, dirty, uncut, or cut. They are just simple navigating devices. Roomba has no conception of whether a surface is 'dirty' or not; it just follows a circular pattern. A robot that can perceive uncut grass versus cut grass, or clean floor versus dirty floor, is strong AI. We don't have such a thing yet.
Not so difficult that it hasn't been solved multiple times, multiple ways, including such variations as stair-climbing and running. Those devices can only operate in well-defined, unchanging laboratory conditions. These are artificial worlds of simple geometric shapes, like staircases, that humans inhabit. They aren't able to navigate the real world and novel environments on the level that simple insects with decentralized nervous systems can. When roboticists make such a device, they 'cheat' by programming the thing by telling it exactly what the environment looks like beforehand. By contrast, living, mobile organisms are almost constantly encountering a novel environment or a new route. A squirrel can take the 'same' path it took yesterday, even though it's covered with new-fallen snow and looks completely different.
Not if there's a good image-matching mechanism, it isn't. Such a general image-matching mechanism doesn't exist. We do have highly specialized ones, but they are very specific. For instance, we have programs that can recognize human faces, but only if they are face-on, with consistent lighting. It gets tripped up if it sees a chimpanzee face, a mask, or a picture of clouds.
I'm not saying AI is unsolveable, or a mystery; all I'm saying is that Turing machines aren't up to the task. So far, they can only perform pre-programmed tasks in highly specialized, unchanging environments. Throw in an unexpected variable and they lock up.
Describing the algorithms qualitatively is different than defining what they actually are. Evolutionary psychologists really don't do anything essentially different than say something like "Human beings are able to perceive a difference between indoors and outdoors, and clean and dirty. This allows them to keep their house clean, which provides a selective advantage in evolutionary terms, over and above an ape that can't tell the difference between clean and dirty, or indoors and outdoors."
They aren't really *defining* the algorithm ( and I don't think it's safe to assume that it *is* an algorithm as we know them, given the spectacular failure of AI so far ) , just describing it. Saying that "Humans can and do perceive 'indoors and outdoors' is different than describing the actual mechanism of how they do it. The actual functioning of the algorithm remains a black box. Which means then that you don't have any plans or blueprints for building a robot that can wash floors.
I'm not speaking of AI here (or at least, not yet) but just robots that would be able to clean your floor, carry your groceries... Well, you are talking about AI here. It turns out that it's relatively easy to make a computer that can beat humans in chess or do complex math equations, but something as simple as walking with 6, 4, or two legs, which a lot of really stupid organisms do, is really difficult. Something like distinguishing 'indoors' from 'outdoors' or a cloud bank from the bushes, seems way in the future.
My pet theory is that we don't have the right kind of device yet. A mind, the 'function' of an organic nervous system, is not a Turing machine. I don't really understand the math behind it, but Goedel's incompleteness theorem seems to show that a human mathematician can understand certain mathematical proofs that a Turing machine can never prove. Since all computers are a essentially a Turing machine, no matter how fast or parallelized they are, or how much memory they have, they will never be able to do what a human mind can do. So, maybe someday we will have artificial intelligence, or, a floor-washing robot, but we currently don't have the right kind of device that can do it.
But running a scam like this out of Sweden seems like a big risk to me. But then I have no idea how good the Swedish legal system is. I thought they had some very strong consumer protection laws. It is probably safer to buy this if you live in Sweden than the US. Scamsters are like liars or kleptomaniacs. They just can't make an honest living. They have to cheat and lie. It's a mental disorder. It doesn't matter what the risks are or what country they live in.
Cause I for one WANT TO KNOW. Why can't we just block the whole country? The whole goddamn country? Just shunt the whole IP prefix off the map? Tell the routers that it's a ping flood and dump the bozos? Do you really want to cut off a whole country because of some bad apples who are abusing the internet by attempting to commit fraud? What if *you* and the rest of your country were cut off from the rest of the world on the internet because the majority of spam originated from your country?
Well, my personal prediction is that it will be 'successful', but not in the way that the OLPC planners will want it to be. The OLPC project is designed to be some kind of textbook replacement for kids in poor villages going to school. That will be moderately successful in a few areas.
My prediction is that most of these OLPCs will be 're-purposed' by adults and young, budding geeks in small villages. It's like when cell phones came into rural Africa. Mining companies saw it was too expensive to run phone lines all throughout the jungle, so they threw up cell towers. Villagers got a hold of second-hand cell phones, and low-and-behold, they started lining up buyers to buy their crops as they were harvesting them in the field, instead of dragging them all the way to market only to have them rot in the hot sun.
So the success won't be village school children learning from them, but the amazing new programs and communication technologies that both adults and children use *for their own purposes*, instead of doing what we think they should be doing with them.
One of the programming languages that is coming with the OLPC is Smalltalk. That means there will be a new generation of millions 3rd world LISP-like hackers spread all throughout the world. This will be their first computer language. Not c, not BASIC, not visual basic. This, I predict, will lead to amazing new programs.
So in a year or so... We'll shortly know how this massive social experiment works out. In a year or so? What exactly do you expect to happen in a year or so? The end of starvation and civil wars in Africa?
I think a more reasonable time frame is 10 or 15 years. I remember using BBSes in the mid 90s and dreaming about an internet connection and one of those funky email addresses with an '@' symbol in it. I would never, *never*, *NEVER* in a million years predicted technologies such as Wikipedia or Bittorrent. Nobody did -- not Bill Gates, not Negroponte -- not any of the Powerful Old Men in computers. It takes a generation of new kids who can think outside the box and have the free time and audacity to try something that everyone knows could never work. Even now very few wikipedia proponents would ever say that they thought it would be as successful as it is.
If millions of kids spend their formative years with a completely hackable, programmable, peer-networked computer, we are going to see a complete revolution of computing technology. It doesn't matter that they have brown skin, speak no English, or live in a jungle hut. They will do amazing things with programs and computers that the last generation would never think of. If there are millions of OLPCs distributed, the internet will be totally different 20 years from now.
Nobody seriously argues that the human species originated anywhere but Africa. If I recall my anthropology classes correctly, that's true now, but there was a time when not everybody was so sure about that. Certainly hominids arose in Africa, but there was some debate about whether physiologically modern humans arose in Africa, or somewhere else, or were a mongrel of different hominids running across the continents.
The evidence of that is overwhelming, and evidence of humans elsewhere on the planet is fairly recent (geologically speaking;-). It's obvious from the evidence that humans spread out from Africa, though exactly when depends on which fossils you accept as "human". It's better to say that "hominids" arose in Africa and spread from there. Thus the debate, I guess.
Some taboos are universal, such as not having sex with a sibling, or not pooping in public. This is not true. Both of these are cultural. We are taught both these things. Neither are natural, inherent, or universal. Most anthropologists and cognitive scientists, who actual study human beings and culture, would disagree with you. Just because they are explicitly taught does not mean they are not also instinctual.
This is not related to my comment. Please respond on topic. You said "taboo subjects are taboo because they refer to things that we wouldn't encounter in everyday life." I said that this is wrong because the things you list you encounter in everyday life. How is shit, piss, and fucking not part of everyday life? How did you get here? How do you remove waste from your body? Shitting and pissing isn't an everyday thing for you? You need to have that looked at. To be pedantic, I have had a few days when I haven't used the bathroom at all, not even to urinate.
But more to the point, you're right; I misspoke. What I meant was, we don't bring these things into the public sphere. We don't use the bathroom in public, we go in a little private room. We don't have sex in public, we normally go in a private place, and it's illegal to do otherwise.
. Why is potty humor ok for children with some words but not other words? There are lots of things that are okay for children to do that are not tolerated for adults to do. Kids can walk around in the nude, doing so as an adult would get you arrested.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, you need to decide how much time you want to spend on economic things anyway, as opposed to socializing and entertainment, but if you have extra hours in your business time budget, spend it looking to save money.
I guess at this point it's a matter of definitions, but I would still say we don't have the device yet. You were right; I was wrong; we do have 'Turing-Plus' devices. However, we don't know *yet* what specific Turing-plus device can give of the behavior of the human brain. We can hook up cameras and thermometers to Turing machines, but somehow we haven't yet come up with AI. And I suspect that a Turing-plus device may not even be what gives us AI. I think we might get a device that can solve strong AI problems that contains *no* Turing machine. But, i also do believe that the human machine contains at least one Turing machine, so a complete re-creating of the mind would contain a Turing machine.
I don't really understand the math beyond a metaphorical level. I don't really understand what completeness or inconsistency is. I don't think it matters that the human mind may or may not be complete or consistent. The point, as I understand it, is that a human mind is able to see the proof that a system cannot both be consistent and complete, whereas a Turing machine would never be able to demonstrate that. However, referencing Gödel's incompleteness theorems just because they sound appropriate at first glance does not give any argument scientific credibility. Similarly, referencing a book about Goedel's theorem just because is might be relevant has no scientific. I have no reason to believe Torkel Franzen over J. R. Lucas or Goedel himself. It all depends on the details of their arguments. In this case, Lucas is more convincing to me. A human being can 'understand' that a Turing machine can never understand certain things. It doesn't matter that a human can't necessarily understand those things either; all that matters is that a human can understand that a Turing machine can't understand something, which is a feat that the Turing machine can't do.
You are right, but my point is that far and away, what our visual system evolved to perceive were complex, non-geometric systems, such as cloud formations, or where the 'path' is as it wanders from the forest to the open field.
No tree looks like a triangle. From any angle, they have a cloudy, amorphous, fractal structure. There aren't any 'points' in the shadow, nor even straight lines. You can't understand clouds using classical geometry. You can't know anything about a river from it's shape using geometry -- you need fluid dynamics modeling. A triangle doesn't need to be perfect in order for you to recognise it as a triangle. It just needs three pointy bits, and there are plenty of objects like that in nature. A "mathematical" triangle with straight edges is just a special case of a "natural" triangle. I'd like to see the computer program that can look at a tree's shadow and call it a 'triangle'. Hell, I'd like to see the computer program that can pick a shadow out of the grass!
Yes, we're talking about it because I brought it up, but the reason it's relevant is because it demonstrates that humans can do something that Turing machines ( read: computers ) cannot. Otherwise, why talk about Goedel's theorem? We could talk about any theorem whatsoever. There's no point in talking about theorems, Goedels or not, and AI, unless it tells us something we didn't know before.
Imagine this picture: The sky, with two different cloud types merging into one another. Below that, the tree-line, with 200 different species of trees in it. Below that, the underbrush, with 1,000 different plant speicies in it. Below that, winding river. This is the type of image that the human mind has to process. What time is it? How dark is the sky? Will it be night soon? Will it rain tonight? How many hours do I have before the sun sets, or before it rains?
Are there any edible trees in the tree-line there? Are there any camouflaged panthers hiding in the branches, waiting to drop on me? Are there any edible plants in the underbrush? Are there any camouflaged rabbits in there that I might kill?
How fast is that river going? How deep is it? How cold is it? Is it potable? Are there fish or crustaceans in it?
In order to survive in that environment, the human mind needs a complex, fuzzy-matching, fractal processing ability. Human beings never saw a square or triangle until the first cities were built, about 12-15,000 years ago.
Your implication is that the human mind cannot be reduced to a Turing machine. I am in the other camp--who believe that the mind is subject to rigorous physical law, and that physical law can be expressed arithmetically (in principle), and so the human mind is a Turing machine.
I'm not saying that the mind is not subject to physical law, or is not based on math. All I'm saying is that the mind is not a Turing machine ( though it probably would have to have a Turing machine in it somewhere ). It's a different *kind* of machine, not a super-powerful Turing machine.
Goedel basically showed that a Turing machine cannot do *all* the kinds of math that a human mind can do ( though it can do some). Not that a Turing machine lacks a certain amount of power, but just that it never will. It's just quantitavely the wrong tool for the job. It doesn't matter how much power you give it; the 'weakest' Turing machine is essentially the same as the 'strongest' one; it just simply can't do certain things. If a human is able to perceive and understand this, to know something that a Turing machine can't know, then the mind cannot *solely* be a Turing machine. This does not mean that the mind is not a different *kind* of machine, based on physical law, instead of some mystic hocus-pocus; it's just that it's not a Turing machine. My claim is that the mind is a qualitatively different kind of machine, not a Turing machine.
Goedel's theorem says that a consistent arithmetic system will contain unprovable truths. Put otherwise, such a system cannot be both consistent and complete. Thus the Goedel counterargument to Strong AI (that human minds and computers are not fundamentally different) is that humans (e.g. mathematicians) can prove things like Godel's theorem, so we are able to "rise above" the arithmetic and exist in states of full proof and full consistency.
But I think there is a flaw in that logic (note: I am not a mathematician). The theorem doesn't preclude that a given arithmetic system (e.g. human mind) will be able to prove a truth that a weaker system ignored. Thus our ability to see certain truths doesn't mean that there are not other truths that are unprovable to us.
I don't think the implication of Goedel's theorem shows that we 'rise above' the Turing machine, but rather that we have a qualitatively different awareness or knowledge that a Turing machine doesn't have.
Goedel's theorem is recursive. Any human mathematician can see that no matter how powerful the symbolic system is, the Turing machine will never be complete; there will be truths that the system can't prove. No matter how much you expand a particular system to show any truth a weaker system missed, there will be more truths that the newer, more powerful system missed. This process can go on ad naseum into infinity. A human mind can perceive this foray into eternity, but the Turing machine has no way of proving it. How could a human mind perceive something that a Turing machine couldn't, unless we had some component that was fundamentally different than a Turing machine?
What we seem to have that the Turing machine doesn't is meta-knowledge. We can see that any attempt to create a complete and consistent arithmetic system on a Turing machine will just lead to an endless series of more powerful systems that produce ever more elusive truths, and the process never ends. In this sense the Turing machine is 'myopic' -- it will never stop and say "Hey, I'm not getting anywhere with this; this is an infinite loop. No matter how powerful the system is, there will always be more truths that it cannot express." It's unable to know what it can't know, so to speak. However, as humans, we can somehow see the 'big picture', that no matter how powerful a system you make, there will always be another level of truths out there.
More fundamentally, no one has actually shown that the human mind is either consistent or complete (proving both would be required to sh
Not so difficult that it hasn't been solved multiple times, multiple ways, including such variations as stair-climbing and running. Those devices can only operate in well-defined, unchanging laboratory conditions. These are artificial worlds of simple geometric shapes, like staircases, that humans inhabit. They aren't able to navigate the real world and novel environments on the level that simple insects with decentralized nervous systems can. When roboticists make such a device, they 'cheat' by programming the thing by telling it exactly what the environment looks like beforehand. By contrast, living, mobile organisms are almost constantly encountering a novel environment or a new route. A squirrel can take the 'same' path it took yesterday, even though it's covered with new-fallen snow and looks completely different. Not if there's a good image-matching mechanism, it isn't. Such a general image-matching mechanism doesn't exist. We do have highly specialized ones, but they are very specific. For instance, we have programs that can recognize human faces, but only if they are face-on, with consistent lighting. It gets tripped up if it sees a chimpanzee face, a mask, or a picture of clouds.
I'm not saying AI is unsolveable, or a mystery; all I'm saying is that Turing machines aren't up to the task. So far, they can only perform pre-programmed tasks in highly specialized, unchanging environments. Throw in an unexpected variable and they lock up.
Describing the algorithms qualitatively is different than defining what they actually are. Evolutionary psychologists really don't do anything essentially different than say something like "Human beings are able to perceive a difference between indoors and outdoors, and clean and dirty. This allows them to keep their house clean, which provides a selective advantage in evolutionary terms, over and above an ape that can't tell the difference between clean and dirty, or indoors and outdoors."
They aren't really *defining* the algorithm ( and I don't think it's safe to assume that it *is* an algorithm as we know them, given the spectacular failure of AI so far ) , just describing it. Saying that "Humans can and do perceive 'indoors and outdoors' is different than describing the actual mechanism of how they do it. The actual functioning of the algorithm remains a black box. Which means then that you don't have any plans or blueprints for building a robot that can wash floors.
My pet theory is that we don't have the right kind of device yet. A mind, the 'function' of an organic nervous system, is not a Turing machine. I don't really understand the math behind it, but Goedel's incompleteness theorem seems to show that a human mathematician can understand certain mathematical proofs that a Turing machine can never prove. Since all computers are a essentially a Turing machine, no matter how fast or parallelized they are, or how much memory they have, they will never be able to do what a human mind can do. So, maybe someday we will have artificial intelligence, or, a floor-washing robot, but we currently don't have the right kind of device that can do it.
Whatever way the mining camps and buildings get electricity, I guess.
Sorry, I got mixed up. I was thinking of scheme, which is a LISP-derivative.
Well, my personal prediction is that it will be 'successful', but not in the way that the OLPC planners will want it to be. The OLPC project is designed to be some kind of textbook replacement for kids in poor villages going to school. That will be moderately successful in a few areas.
My prediction is that most of these OLPCs will be 're-purposed' by adults and young, budding geeks in small villages. It's like when cell phones came into rural Africa. Mining companies saw it was too expensive to run phone lines all throughout the jungle, so they threw up cell towers. Villagers got a hold of second-hand cell phones, and low-and-behold, they started lining up buyers to buy their crops as they were harvesting them in the field, instead of dragging them all the way to market only to have them rot in the hot sun.
So the success won't be village school children learning from them, but the amazing new programs and communication technologies that both adults and children use *for their own purposes*, instead of doing what we think they should be doing with them.
One of the programming languages that is coming with the OLPC is Smalltalk. That means there will be a new generation of millions 3rd world LISP-like hackers spread all throughout the world. This will be their first computer language. Not c, not BASIC, not visual basic. This, I predict, will lead to amazing new programs.
I think a more reasonable time frame is 10 or 15 years. I remember using BBSes in the mid 90s and dreaming about an internet connection and one of those funky email addresses with an '@' symbol in it. I would never, *never*, *NEVER* in a million years predicted technologies such as Wikipedia or Bittorrent. Nobody did -- not Bill Gates, not Negroponte -- not any of the Powerful Old Men in computers. It takes a generation of new kids who can think outside the box and have the free time and audacity to try something that everyone knows could never work. Even now very few wikipedia proponents would ever say that they thought it would be as successful as it is.
If millions of kids spend their formative years with a completely hackable, programmable, peer-networked computer, we are going to see a complete revolution of computing technology. It doesn't matter that they have brown skin, speak no English, or live in a jungle hut. They will do amazing things with programs and computers that the last generation would never think of. If there are millions of OLPCs distributed, the internet will be totally different 20 years from now.
But more to the point, you're right; I misspoke. What I meant was, we don't bring these things into the public sphere. We don't use the bathroom in public, we go in a little private room. We don't have sex in public, we normally go in a private place, and it's illegal to do otherwise. . Why is potty humor ok for children with some words but not other words? There are lots of things that are okay for children to do that are not tolerated for adults to do. Kids can walk around in the nude, doing so as an adult would get you arrested.