Well of course they made a move to disbar Jack Thompson. There can only be one king asshole and they certainly weren't going to let some schmuck hold the title.
Just think of how inconvenient it would be to have a brain-controlled TV while having friends over. You'd either be fighting over the controls or the channels would switch to porn the second a commercial popped up.
That's kind of sad since grammar holds all of the interesting quirks of any given language. On it's own, diagramming sentences is pretty boring, but when taken in the context of doing text analysis to enumerate patterns, extract information, or answer questions, it can actually be quite rewarding. Maybe the reasons students are bored or there is a perception that they are bored is that they don't understand how they can use that knowledge. If I'm just writing a paper, which I'm sure is the case for most students, I usually belt out a few sentences and tend not to worry about grammar too much; peer-review and revisions tend to fix the more obvious mistakes. If I need to process a language, then I care about how the rules apply and under what circumstances they don't. Maybe the problem isn't that grammar is boring, it's just that few people understand how it can be useful, including adults.
Damn, that actually makes me want to convert to broadband. Seriously, there are some really poor websites out there that opt for flash (pun sorta intended) over functionality. If less people visit their sites, they may be forced to design something a little less obnoxious.
Academic Probation:).
I've gotten into confusing conversations where one person was referring to it as this definition with a semi-apologetic nonchalance and I thought they meant Advanced Placement.
One of the advantages of being in school however, is that you have more experienced professors to guide you through starting your own business or projects. It seriously saves a HUGE amount of work having someone provide insights as to what will and will not work and the reasons behind that. It is also particularly useful to be guided in terms of what you should learn as the professor may have more insight as to what materials have content and what materials are merely hype.
Yes, it is possible to not go to school, and develop valuable experiences, nut I believe that the resources offered at academic institutions, if used properly, can offer more effective opportunities for growth.
Those so called slackers weren't copying, they were actually developing a form of distributed revision control! Think about it. The more people you let copy your work, the more likely you can get back an exact duplicate or even an older revision, in the case that your copy becomes corrupt.:)
Ah, sorry, I'm a little off topic.
Also, one of the point's I'm trying to get at, in terms over definition, is that often, we structure a problem in such a way, that it is impossible for the computer to achieve it. Using broad, encompassing terms, without providing a road map of how to fulfill the definition, will doom any project to failure. Other domains could be considered to have succeeded because their goals were well defined or had physical artifacts. With AI, with regards to your definition, we have neither. With your structuring of the problem, it is impossible for the computer to arrive at a solution. If it's impossible for the computer, it would be impossible for the domain of AI. It makes the task of AI equivalent to asking for proof that God exists or that humans have souls. In order for the field to feasibly develop AI the field must explore the "lowest hanging fruit" of "trivial" solutions.
Well, what do you mean by intelligence? A machine that can walk? Catch a ball? Do math problems? Identify relevant phrases? I'm not asking for a redefinition of the term 'intelligence' I'm asking for a specific, or even precise definition, of the term. The tasks which are considered the lowest hanging fruit are rarely obvious beforehand and are performed because they tackle a more specific aspect of the overall goal, in this case intelligence. For a decent definition let's go to the dictionary, shall we?
Intelligence:
1 a (1): the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason; also : the skilled use of reason (2): the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (as tests)
Intelligence :
is an umbrella term used to describe a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn. There are several ways to define intelligence. In some cases, intelligence may include traits such as creativity, personality, character, knowledge, or wisdom. However, some psychologists prefer not to include these traits in the definition of intelligence.
The Mariam-Websert defines the term as an ability to learn and apply that knowledge to new sources. Well, since a computer starts out with no information, we must tell it how to use new information or assimilate it. Now this is where we get into a bit of an argument, and where Wikipedia's definition kicks in. A computer can adapt to new information within the scope of a solving a specialized problem. It's not very graceful at handling new problems outside that scope. This is because, as Wikipedia states, it's used as an umbrella term to encompass many mental abilities. My argument is that the computer can approach true AI if we define the problems and aggregate the possible tools to solve the problem. Comparing a computer to an organism doesn't quite count, because the organism is born with the tools for intelligence. We need to explicitly give the computer those tools. The missing piece is one of two things: either we haven't found a good enough solution to generalize to all problems or we haven't developed a proper means of tying the solutions together; i.e. pick the best tool for the problem; I think it's the latter. You say AI is a failure because there isn't a computer or system that fits your definition of intelligence. I say AI is still a work in progress partly because the problem is poorly defined and relatively new (when compared to other disciplines). We've had math, biology, chemistry, and physics for well over 100 years. We've only recently had computers that could even scratch the computing power we need for some these problems.
So I don't think AI is a failure despite my seemingly insufficient examples of pieces that work towards machine reasoning.
My point about naming various subfields is that the questions we were asking at the time, though simple sounding, were actually quite complex. Back then we were trying to achieve some form of machine 'awareness' or 'intelligence' (whatever that means), but the problems/questions were very broad and ambiguous with regards to what they actually mean. Ultimately, we want the computer to 'think' like a human or to at least have a similar or greater level of performance. To do this, you have to define the task, the goal, the mathematical machine, you're planning to use, and perhaps even the function you are planning to optimize. In some respects, machines have performed very well: Darpa driverless cars, Captcha Cracked, NLP Libraries, etc. In fact, I've noticed that the BofA tellers are able to extract the payment amount. Despite what you say, the technologies are pervading our lives, just not the way you expect it. I think you're just being lazy, because you're just looking for some insta-machine solution for everything when it is possible to find a solution for a problem, just not the same solution.
I don't think AI has disappeared because it was a disappointment, but rather, that the knowledge constituting it has changed names or spawned sub-fields of its own: machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), image processing, latent semantic analysis (LSA), markov models (MM), conditional random fields (CRF), support vector machines (SVM) etc. The task of learning, teaching a computer the semantic and tacit processes of the human, often boils down to a classification problem in which we give the computer a labeled training set or some rules and the computer tries to label the test set. In the case of markov models, we might pass it training data and it extrapolates sequential probabilities for labeling. For LSA, we just give it (a lot)data and it computes similarity based on dimension reduction. Ultimately, AI seems to have evolved into a bunch of optimized heuristics that perform really well. Much of it is still art and black magic, which is why it has become these many different subjects or algorithms. Different solutions suite different problems depending on the problem and data you have.
As for 'self-awareness', that term is bullshit, since there really is no good mathematical definition for it. If we can't define it precisely, then how is a computer going to achieve it?
if(true){
print "I am aware?"
}
My favorite is when they ask for years of experience greater than the years a technology has been out.
Job only requires 50 years C# experience, 20 unicorns.... *and in very tiny print* every waking hour of your life.
For 20k peanuts!
Sadly, you forget that the whole purpose of education (at least Highschool down) was not to train you to be an intelligent person, but rather a factory drone. Why do you think you were forced to read 'Peter and Jane' books by protocol? It wasn't to teach you, but to get you to conform. I've found that it's only when you start to get to the higher levels of education that academia starts to open up and guide you to think for yourself. Mostly because you're trying to define your own work, publish papers, and push the boundaries of what is known (undergraduate schooling barely fits this if you're the industrious sort). The problem I think is that we're undergoing a paradigm shift as a nation (for America at least). The education was geared towards training factory workers, but those jobs have moved offshores for cheaper labor. What we have now is an outdated academic system trying to serve a changing economy. Basically, there are and will be technical or artsy jobs that will require clever people and there will be service jobs that require mediocre people. Unfortunately, we're catering to the latter because it sounds trendy and makes politicians look nice because they are catering towards the masses for a larger vote. I've learned that there are some cases in this environment, where if you want an education and you want to be successful, you have to ignore or work around people being stupid.
Not really. The whole point of the South Park defense was to get out of trouble by being humble and flattering the enemy. In the Chinese hacking incident, the big penis joke was more analogous to having Americans being told that they have hardened systems that couldn't be cracked (pun sorta intended). In the case of this article, the Japanese scientists are being perfectly transparent in showing that there is a hole with quantum cryptography. Just having Japanese people in the subject is not sufficient for saying the two articles are equivalent or even relate to the same joke.
I dunno, it seems pretty clear cut that MS is doing this for their own interests. It just so happens that their interests and the morally right choice coincide. Don't let your rabid hatred of MS blind you to reason.
Do you have a specific example to go with one or each of those items. The experience one is pretty obvious and dishonest politicking/crony earmarks kinda goes with the territory. So, I guess I'm wondering if you could cite an event where he was out of line, even for a politician.
I'm not really trolling here, I'm just curious.
Clippy: Looks like you're making a letter. Would you like help?
Clippy: Looks like your letter is finished. Would you like me to print it?
Clippy: Looks like you're infringing on a copyright. Would you like me to call you a lawyer?
* Throws computer out window *
How practical would such a device be for working? It would actually be pretty useful to remove the need to do all the point-clicky stuff and keep my hands localized to the keyboard; granted, does a lot of that already with its interface. I don't know if it would be feasible, because I bet far more neurons would fire when working on a hard problem, thus interfering with the mouse's accuracy. I wouldn't want the mouse to fly everywhere if I were trying to type hello world:).
Hmm...but isn't it a general complaint among scientists that work they view important doesn't get government funding just because their work isn't trendy. Blogging and campaigning for funds doesn't seem like too bad of a thing because the scientist is providing a service of explaining what the heck they do to the general public. It seems like lack of good general scientific journalism is the reason why we're in the sorry state we are today, where academic research funding gets continually cut because other things seem much more important.
Slashdot Mirror
Well of course they made a move to disbar Jack Thompson. There can only be one king asshole and they certainly weren't going to let some schmuck hold the title.
Just think of how inconvenient it would be to have a brain-controlled TV while having friends over. You'd either be fighting over the controls or the channels would switch to porn the second a commercial popped up.
That's kind of sad since grammar holds all of the interesting quirks of any given language. On it's own, diagramming sentences is pretty boring, but when taken in the context of doing text analysis to enumerate patterns, extract information, or answer questions, it can actually be quite rewarding. Maybe the reasons students are bored or there is a perception that they are bored is that they don't understand how they can use that knowledge. If I'm just writing a paper, which I'm sure is the case for most students, I usually belt out a few sentences and tend not to worry about grammar too much; peer-review and revisions tend to fix the more obvious mistakes. If I need to process a language, then I care about how the rules apply and under what circumstances they don't. Maybe the problem isn't that grammar is boring, it's just that few people understand how it can be useful, including adults.
Damn, that actually makes me want to convert to broadband. Seriously, there are some really poor websites out there that opt for flash (pun sorta intended) over functionality. If less people visit their sites, they may be forced to design something a little less obnoxious.
Just look at Vista. M$ must have been planning waaay into the future when we'll have a million cores.
Is it me or does it just a bit off-putting to use an analogy to equate some of the world's more innovative pioneers with the mc'nugget?
Academic Probation :).
I've gotten into confusing conversations where one person was referring to it as this definition with a semi-apologetic nonchalance and I thought they meant Advanced Placement.
One of the advantages of being in school however, is that you have more experienced professors to guide you through starting your own business or projects. It seriously saves a HUGE amount of work having someone provide insights as to what will and will not work and the reasons behind that. It is also particularly useful to be guided in terms of what you should learn as the professor may have more insight as to what materials have content and what materials are merely hype.
Yes, it is possible to not go to school, and develop valuable experiences, nut I believe that the resources offered at academic institutions, if used properly, can offer more effective opportunities for growth.
Those so called slackers weren't copying, they were actually developing a form of distributed revision control! Think about it. The more people you let copy your work, the more likely you can get back an exact duplicate or even an older revision, in the case that your copy becomes corrupt. :)
Ah, sorry, I'm a little off topic.
Also, one of the point's I'm trying to get at, in terms over definition, is that often, we structure a problem in such a way, that it is impossible for the computer to achieve it. Using broad, encompassing terms, without providing a road map of how to fulfill the definition, will doom any project to failure. Other domains could be considered to have succeeded because their goals were well defined or had physical artifacts. With AI, with regards to your definition, we have neither. With your structuring of the problem, it is impossible for the computer to arrive at a solution. If it's impossible for the computer, it would be impossible for the domain of AI. It makes the task of AI equivalent to asking for proof that God exists or that humans have souls. In order for the field to feasibly develop AI the field must explore the "lowest hanging fruit" of "trivial" solutions.
Well, what do you mean by intelligence? A machine that can walk? Catch a ball? Do math problems? Identify relevant phrases? I'm not asking for a redefinition of the term 'intelligence' I'm asking for a specific, or even precise definition, of the term. The tasks which are considered the lowest hanging fruit are rarely obvious beforehand and are performed because they tackle a more specific aspect of the overall goal, in this case intelligence. For a decent definition let's go to the dictionary, shall we?
Intelligence:
1 a (1): the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason; also : the skilled use of reason (2): the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (as tests)
Intelligence
: is an umbrella term used to describe a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn. There are several ways to define intelligence. In some cases, intelligence may include traits such as creativity, personality, character, knowledge, or wisdom. However, some psychologists prefer not to include these traits in the definition of intelligence.
The Mariam-Websert defines the term as an ability to learn and apply that knowledge to new sources. Well, since a computer starts out with no information, we must tell it how to use new information or assimilate it. Now this is where we get into a bit of an argument, and where Wikipedia's definition kicks in. A computer can adapt to new information within the scope of a solving a specialized problem. It's not very graceful at handling new problems outside that scope. This is because, as Wikipedia states, it's used as an umbrella term to encompass many mental abilities. My argument is that the computer can approach true AI if we define the problems and aggregate the possible tools to solve the problem. Comparing a computer to an organism doesn't quite count, because the organism is born with the tools for intelligence. We need to explicitly give the computer those tools. The missing piece is one of two things: either we haven't found a good enough solution to generalize to all problems or we haven't developed a proper means of tying the solutions together; i.e. pick the best tool for the problem; I think it's the latter. You say AI is a failure because there isn't a computer or system that fits your definition of intelligence. I say AI is still a work in progress partly because the problem is poorly defined and relatively new (when compared to other disciplines). We've had math, biology, chemistry, and physics for well over 100 years. We've only recently had computers that could even scratch the computing power we need for some these problems.
So I don't think AI is a failure despite my seemingly insufficient examples of pieces that work towards machine reasoning.
My point about naming various subfields is that the questions we were asking at the time, though simple sounding, were actually quite complex. Back then we were trying to achieve some form of machine 'awareness' or 'intelligence' (whatever that means), but the problems/questions were very broad and ambiguous with regards to what they actually mean. Ultimately, we want the computer to 'think' like a human or to at least have a similar or greater level of performance. To do this, you have to define the task, the goal, the mathematical machine, you're planning to use, and perhaps even the function you are planning to optimize. In some respects, machines have performed very well: Darpa driverless cars, Captcha Cracked, NLP Libraries, etc. In fact, I've noticed that the BofA tellers are able to extract the payment amount. Despite what you say, the technologies are pervading our lives, just not the way you expect it. I think you're just being lazy, because you're just looking for some insta-machine solution for everything when it is possible to find a solution for a problem, just not the same solution.
I don't think AI has disappeared because it was a disappointment, but rather, that the knowledge constituting it has changed names or spawned sub-fields of its own: machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), image processing, latent semantic analysis (LSA), markov models (MM), conditional random fields (CRF), support vector machines (SVM) etc. The task of learning, teaching a computer the semantic and tacit processes of the human, often boils down to a classification problem in which we give the computer a labeled training set or some rules and the computer tries to label the test set. In the case of markov models, we might pass it training data and it extrapolates sequential probabilities for labeling. For LSA, we just give it (a lot)data and it computes similarity based on dimension reduction. Ultimately, AI seems to have evolved into a bunch of optimized heuristics that perform really well. Much of it is still art and black magic, which is why it has become these many different subjects or algorithms. Different solutions suite different problems depending on the problem and data you have.
As for 'self-awareness', that term is bullshit, since there really is no good mathematical definition for it. If we can't define it precisely, then how is a computer going to achieve it? if(true){
print "I am aware?"
}
My favorite is when they ask for years of experience greater than the years a technology has been out. .... *and in very tiny print* every waking hour of your life.
Job only requires 50 years C# experience, 20 unicorns
For 20k peanuts!
Sadly, you forget that the whole purpose of education (at least Highschool down) was not to train you to be an intelligent person, but rather a factory drone. Why do you think you were forced to read 'Peter and Jane' books by protocol? It wasn't to teach you, but to get you to conform. I've found that it's only when you start to get to the higher levels of education that academia starts to open up and guide you to think for yourself. Mostly because you're trying to define your own work, publish papers, and push the boundaries of what is known (undergraduate schooling barely fits this if you're the industrious sort). The problem I think is that we're undergoing a paradigm shift as a nation (for America at least). The education was geared towards training factory workers, but those jobs have moved offshores for cheaper labor. What we have now is an outdated academic system trying to serve a changing economy. Basically, there are and will be technical or artsy jobs that will require clever people and there will be service jobs that require mediocre people. Unfortunately, we're catering to the latter because it sounds trendy and makes politicians look nice because they are catering towards the masses for a larger vote. I've learned that there are some cases in this environment, where if you want an education and you want to be successful, you have to ignore or work around people being stupid.
I know where you live, I have your traceroute.
Not really. The whole point of the South Park defense was to get out of trouble by being humble and flattering the enemy. In the Chinese hacking incident, the big penis joke was more analogous to having Americans being told that they have hardened systems that couldn't be cracked (pun sorta intended). In the case of this article, the Japanese scientists are being perfectly transparent in showing that there is a hole with quantum cryptography. Just having Japanese people in the subject is not sufficient for saying the two articles are equivalent or even relate to the same joke.
I dunno, it seems pretty clear cut that MS is doing this for their own interests. It just so happens that their interests and the morally right choice coincide. Don't let your rabid hatred of MS blind you to reason.
Do you have a specific example to go with one or each of those items. The experience one is pretty obvious and dishonest politicking/crony earmarks kinda goes with the territory. So, I guess I'm wondering if you could cite an event where he was out of line, even for a politician.
I'm not really trolling here, I'm just curious.
Clippy: Looks like you're making a letter. Would you like help?
Clippy: Looks like your letter is finished. Would you like me to print it?
Clippy: Looks like you're infringing on a copyright. Would you like me to call you a lawyer?
* Throws computer out window *
How practical would such a device be for working? It would actually be pretty useful to remove the need to do all the point-clicky stuff and keep my hands localized to the keyboard; granted, does a lot of that already with its interface. I don't know if it would be feasible, because I bet far more neurons would fire when working on a hard problem, thus interfering with the mouse's accuracy. I wouldn't want the mouse to fly everywhere if I were trying to type hello world :).
Hmm...but isn't it a general complaint among scientists that work they view important doesn't get government funding just because their work isn't trendy. Blogging and campaigning for funds doesn't seem like too bad of a thing because the scientist is providing a service of explaining what the heck they do to the general public. It seems like lack of good general scientific journalism is the reason why we're in the sorry state we are today, where academic research funding gets continually cut because other things seem much more important.
Ya, but you might want to use protection or you'll get burned.
Does it blend?
The fact that I would mod this insightful and not funny deeply saddens me :(.