Did you work in the lab as a guinea pig, by any chance? Because you seem to have very little understanding of what AI is about.
The Turing test is not relevant for one simple reason - it does nothing to connect the lines of research that are currently being actively (and - gasp!- successfully, on occasion) pursued in the field of AI. Yes, fifty years ago AI researchers thought that computers would be able to mimic the behavior of human beings: but the field was just emerging at the time, and people didn't have an understanding of the tremendous complexities involved. (Consider, for comparison, that at the time calculus emerged, people thought that it would be the ultimate tool for explaining all mysteries Life, Universe, and Everything.) Since that time however, these complexities became apparent - many problems in AI have been shown to be Turing-undecidable (no algorithmic solution is possible), and virtually every open problem in the field is at least NP-hard. Furthermore, you cannot really develop human-like intelligence without understanding how the human mind works, and that understanding is sadly lacking. It took hundreds of millions of years for evolution to produce intelligent beings: and this is intelligence is manifested through a massively parallel, largely mysterious mechanism (the brain). Is it even remotely reasonable to expect that researchers would be able to emulate this poorly understood mechanism using vastly different underlying hardware in only 50 years?
The point - one that you are so throughly miss - is that the goal of AI is not to build cute robot friends for the human race, but to devise complex systems to solve specific problems that currently require human intelligence. As such, the field of AI has long ago been split into intersecting sub-domains of machine learning, knowledge represetnation, planning, natural language understanding, e.t.c. Each of those has had some degree of success, and produced plenty of concerete results, from expert systems, to game playing, to automatic translators, to SPAM filters, to name just a few. My own research is in Bioinformatics, where machine learning techniques have proven very valuable, and are constantly being used.
Is this real intelligence? You can argue that it is not. But most AI researchers understand that, for now, achieving human-like intelligence a pipe dream: there are neither the computational tools nor the biological understanding to tackle a problem of this magnitude. Instead, the field is slowly advancing in various directions, making some progress in bridging skill-sets that require human intelligence with those that are best accomplished by computers. That is what AI research is really about: it is real, it is rigorous, and it produces tangible, useful results (rather than some abstract notion of being able to fool humans in a chat session.) Calling it a "fraud" out of ignorance hardly changes matters.
At least, not in terms of advice on how to live my/his life. The person I am right now was shaped by the sum total of experiences I've had throughout my lifetime, both good and bad. Granted, I've done a huge amount of stupid things throughout my life (and continue doing them at this very moment - as I'm posting to slashdot when I have a load of work to finish by the day's end), but I do not want to go back and change anything. Yes, I would do many things differently today then I have done in the past - but this is largely because my past experiences, however unpleasant, have helped me gain the insight necessary to understand this. When I have children, I will try to share those insights with them, in order to save them the trouble of making the same mistakes I made (though I don't necessarily expect them to listen to me - some mistakes are universal, and need to be made virtually everyone). However, there is no use in trying to second-guess myself. As an old Yiddish saying goes, "If my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandfather".
Now, in terms of practical advice, that's a whole other story. Buy Microsoft, always check the expiration date on all dairy products, and sell Microsoft in 1999 all come to mind.
Another Good Book on a Similar Topic
on
Fooled by Randomness
·
· Score: 5, Informative
... is Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by John Allen Paulos. I read it a couple of years ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I think it is an excellent commentary on how probability, large numbers, and basic mathematical principles are largely misunderstood by the general public, and the effects that this phenomenon has both on lives of individuals and society as a whole (e.g. the embrace of numerology, or public policy based on sleight-of-hand statistics). All in all, a short, entertaining, and insightful book.
Excuse me? Why must an insightful, to-the-point analysis of the (non-)merits of this firm's claim be bundled with an ill-informed, unsubstantiated anti-Israel rant? I've noticed at least one such post on Slashdot that invariably gets moderated all the way up to +5 every time there is an article relating to Israel in the most minute and insignificant way. This one, however, is particularly blatant. In disputing the company's outlandish claims, the poster makes a few of his own, and the same moderators who are (rightly) skeptical of the "unbreakable cipher" take the poster's claims at face value.
For starters, there is this gem:
Rather, they propagandize for the Israeli high-tech industry, an industry largely created by American taxpayers and which directly competes with American companies.
Really? You get this information from where? Granted, the Israelis get huge foreign aid checks from Uncle Sam every year, but those go overwhelmingly toward military spending. The high-tech industry in Israel is almost completely civilian, and is privately funded, mostly by venture capital (much of which comes from the US, but it's hardly taxpayer dollars). And to claim that Israel, a country of six million people, poses significant competition to American companies is simply ludicrous.
Our own State Department has established that Israel has the most aggressive spying program in the U.S. of any ally, surpassing even such supposedly unfriendly nations as China. Remember the three Israelis in the van who were picked up by police after they were filmed cheering while the WTC collapsed? All former IDF members.
This paragraph really shows where you are coming from. You've just taken several unsubstantiated rumors - some of them circling around for years, others having sprung up after 9/11 - and stated them as facts. Where is the State Department report you refer to, and, more importantly, when was it issued? As for the arrest of three "cheering Isralies", this is a complete misrepresentation of fact, if not a bold-faced myth. Disregarding the fact that the poster provides no link to the story, appealing instead to our collective memory, forgetting that Google finds no credible source supporting this claim, and believing the scenario that three shit-for-brains Israeli citizens were arrested while cheering the collapse of the WTC, what significance does it have that they all served in the IDF? None! Israel has a universal draft, and virtually every Israeli over the age 18 has served in the IDF at one time or another. So why the conspiracy theory?
I do not want to turn this into yet another debate about Israel - this is not the forum for it, nor do such debates lead to anything constructive. However, I do want to voice my disappointment with the group-think that pervades this forum: a paradoxical force that uncritically accepts bullshit propaganda even as it seeks to critically access bullshit marketing. Israel-bashing is a trendy phenomenon these days in intellectual circles, and since many of us belong to these circles, the overall anti-Israel mood on Slashdot is not surprising. (Nor is it unfounded, though it is poorly balanced and blown way out of proportion.) However, subjective views aside, unfounded, outlandish, politically charged claims masquerading as an answer to a technical question should be recognized as such, and classified as "Flamebait" and "Offtopic" (as ideally should happen to this response as well) rather than "Interesting" and "Insightful". Let us all try to think, and moderate responsibly, shall we?
They modelled the way misprints spread as each new citer finds a reference to the original source in any of the papers that already cite it. The model shows that the distribution of misprinted citations of the 1973 paper could only have arisen if 78 per cent of all the citations including the correct ones, were "cut and pasted" from a secondary source...
Really? There is precious little information mentioned about this model in the article. How well does it correllate with existing data (does there even exist survey data questioning scientists about how carefully they read the papers they cite)? What are the assumptions inherent in this model? From the way the New Scientist article is written, the authors create a model that fits the data for just one citation, and use it to make general inferences about the all citations, without any attempt to correlate these inferences with existing observations. Seems highly dubious, to say the least.
This means that when misconceptions take root, they spread like weeds.
This is pure speculation, peddled as the only valid conclusion. What about alternative explanations (like automatic citation generators, as a previous poster mentioned)? And even if the article is correct and it is true that scientists do not carefully read most of the papers they cite, this in no way implies that "misconseptions spread like weeds". A typical scientific paper will include dozens of citations, where only a few are immediately relevant to the existing work. A large portion of citations are either references to well-known and established results with which the target audience of the paper is already familiar, or are there as just another reference for the reader about research done is the area. An error in such citations, even if it is not caught in the peer-review process, will hardly lead to a large-scale spread of misconceptions in the scientific community. In fact, the authors of the article did not bother to include even a single example of such a large-scale spread of misconceptions.
In short, this article seems more sensationalism than fact, and is hardly an indicator of any crisis in the scientific community.
Right you are. The best RPGs, and for that matter, works of fantasy, are those where the world exists not merely as a backbone for the story, but as a separate, autonomous entity, with a history, culture, and multiple goings-on that are completely unrelated to the main story arc. Games, due to their interactive nature, are an excellent medium for creating a sense of immersion, and a believable, detailed world will go a long way to accomplish that goal.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you work in the lab as a guinea pig, by any chance? Because you seem to have very little understanding of what AI is about.
The Turing test is not relevant for one simple reason - it does nothing to connect the lines of research that are currently being actively (and - gasp!- successfully, on occasion) pursued in the field of AI. Yes, fifty years ago AI researchers thought that computers would be able to mimic the behavior of human beings: but the field was just emerging at the time, and people didn't have an understanding of the tremendous complexities involved. (Consider, for comparison, that at the time calculus emerged, people thought that it would be the ultimate tool for explaining all mysteries Life, Universe, and Everything.) Since that time however, these complexities became apparent - many problems in AI have been shown to be Turing-undecidable (no algorithmic solution is possible), and virtually every open problem in the field is at least NP-hard. Furthermore, you cannot really develop human-like intelligence without understanding how the human mind works, and that understanding is sadly lacking. It took hundreds of millions of years for evolution to produce intelligent beings: and this is intelligence is manifested through a massively parallel, largely mysterious mechanism (the brain). Is it even remotely reasonable to expect that researchers would be able to emulate this poorly understood mechanism using vastly different underlying hardware in only 50 years?
The point - one that you are so throughly miss - is that the goal of AI is not to build cute robot friends for the human race, but to devise complex systems to solve specific problems that currently require human intelligence. As such, the field of AI has long ago been split into intersecting sub-domains of machine learning, knowledge represetnation, planning, natural language understanding, e.t.c. Each of those has had some degree of success, and produced plenty of concerete results, from expert systems, to game playing, to automatic translators, to SPAM filters, to name just a few. My own research is in Bioinformatics, where machine learning techniques have proven very valuable, and are constantly being used.
Is this real intelligence? You can argue that it is not. But most AI researchers understand that, for now, achieving human-like intelligence a pipe dream: there are neither the computational tools nor the biological understanding to tackle a problem of this magnitude. Instead, the field is slowly advancing in various directions, making some progress in bridging skill-sets that require human intelligence with those that are best accomplished by computers. That is what AI research is really about: it is real, it is rigorous, and it produces tangible, useful results (rather than some abstract notion of being able to fool humans in a chat session.) Calling it a "fraud" out of ignorance hardly changes matters.
Now, in terms of practical advice, that's a whole other story. Buy Microsoft, always check the expiration date on all dairy products, and sell Microsoft in 1999 all come to mind.
... is Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by John Allen Paulos. I read it a couple of years ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I think it is an excellent commentary on how probability, large numbers, and basic mathematical principles are largely misunderstood by the general public, and the effects that this phenomenon has both on lives of individuals and society as a whole (e.g. the embrace of numerology, or public policy based on sleight-of-hand statistics). All in all, a short, entertaining, and insightful book.
For starters, there is this gem:
Rather, they propagandize for the Israeli high-tech industry, an industry largely created by American taxpayers and which directly competes with American companies.
Really? You get this information from where? Granted, the Israelis get huge foreign aid checks from Uncle Sam every year, but those go overwhelmingly toward military spending. The high-tech industry in Israel is almost completely civilian, and is privately funded, mostly by venture capital (much of which comes from the US, but it's hardly taxpayer dollars). And to claim that Israel, a country of six million people, poses significant competition to American companies is simply ludicrous.
Our own State Department has established that Israel has the most aggressive spying program in the U.S. of any ally, surpassing even such supposedly unfriendly nations as China. Remember the three Israelis in the van who were picked up by police after they were filmed cheering while the WTC collapsed? All former IDF members.
This paragraph really shows where you are coming from. You've just taken several unsubstantiated rumors - some of them circling around for years, others having sprung up after 9/11 - and stated them as facts. Where is the State Department report you refer to, and, more importantly, when was it issued? As for the arrest of three "cheering Isralies", this is a complete misrepresentation of fact, if not a bold-faced myth. Disregarding the fact that the poster provides no link to the story, appealing instead to our collective memory, forgetting that Google finds no credible source supporting this claim, and believing the scenario that three shit-for-brains Israeli citizens were arrested while cheering the collapse of the WTC, what significance does it have that they all served in the IDF? None! Israel has a universal draft, and virtually every Israeli over the age 18 has served in the IDF at one time or another. So why the conspiracy theory?
I do not want to turn this into yet another debate about Israel - this is not the forum for it, nor do such debates lead to anything constructive. However, I do want to voice my disappointment with the group-think that pervades this forum: a paradoxical force that uncritically accepts bullshit propaganda even as it seeks to critically access bullshit marketing. Israel-bashing is a trendy phenomenon these days in intellectual circles, and since many of us belong to these circles, the overall anti-Israel mood on Slashdot is not surprising. (Nor is it unfounded, though it is poorly balanced and blown way out of proportion.) However, subjective views aside, unfounded, outlandish, politically charged claims masquerading as an answer to a technical question should be recognized as such, and classified as "Flamebait" and "Offtopic" (as ideally should happen to this response as well) rather than "Interesting" and "Insightful". Let us all try to think, and moderate responsibly, shall we?
They modelled the way misprints spread as each new citer finds a reference to the original source in any of the papers that already cite it. The model shows that the distribution of misprinted citations of the 1973 paper could only have arisen if 78 per cent of all the citations including the correct ones, were "cut and pasted" from a secondary source ...
Really? There is precious little information mentioned about this model in the article. How well does it correllate with existing data (does there even exist survey data questioning scientists about how carefully they read the papers they cite)? What are the assumptions inherent in this model? From the way the New Scientist article is written, the authors create a model that fits the data for just one citation, and use it to make general inferences about the all citations, without any attempt to correlate these inferences with existing observations. Seems highly dubious, to say the least.
This means that when misconceptions take root, they spread like weeds.
This is pure speculation, peddled as the only valid conclusion. What about alternative explanations (like automatic citation generators, as a previous poster mentioned)? And even if the article is correct and it is true that scientists do not carefully read most of the papers they cite, this in no way implies that "misconseptions spread like weeds". A typical scientific paper will include dozens of citations, where only a few are immediately relevant to the existing work. A large portion of citations are either references to well-known and established results with which the target audience of the paper is already familiar, or are there as just another reference for the reader about research done is the area. An error in such citations, even if it is not caught in the peer-review process, will hardly lead to a large-scale spread of misconceptions in the scientific community. In fact, the authors of the article did not bother to include even a single example of such a large-scale spread of misconceptions.
In short, this article seems more sensationalism than fact, and is hardly an indicator of any crisis in the scientific community.
Right you are. The best RPGs, and for that matter, works of fantasy, are those where the world exists not merely as a backbone for the story, but as a separate, autonomous entity, with a history, culture, and multiple goings-on that are completely unrelated to the main story arc. Games, due to their interactive nature, are an excellent medium for creating a sense of immersion, and a believable, detailed world will go a long way to accomplish that goal.