"Number of errors" is a meaningless metric. You need to take severity, cost of fixing, cost of finding, and damage done into account. But MBA bean-counters cannot do that, as they do not understand anything they are "managing".
Actually some incomplete models that people mistakenly believe to complete. Sure, it looks like cells are just chemical machines, but until one has been built from scratch, that is just an idea, not a hard fact.
I am abreast of the pertaining scientific advancement. They are impressive, but they do not say that we understand the mechanisms involved fully or even mostly. You are misinterpreting them. This is not "creating life from scratch". It is about comparable to doing a BIOS update. That does not mean you know what you are doing and why it works or what the rest of the computer actually does. It does not even make you sure (if you are smart) that what you worked on is a computer.
And with intelligence and consciousness? For the latter there is no physical mechanism in the sense that physics simply does not apply. For the former, it increasingly looks like physics alone cannot do it either.
If not ultimately physics then what?
Unknown at this time. That you do not know how something works is not a valid excuse to fall back to something you know and claim that it must be how things are. You need proof for that. Elimination does not cut it, unless you fully understand the system you are reasoning about. It is amply clear that we do not.
A bit like now, since the revolutions in molecular biology, genetics, and developmental biology, most people no longer consider "what is life" to be such a deep question. Nowadays anyone with an education in these fields really knows quite well what "life" is. There's no big shocking mystery there, just an enormous quantity of really complicated stuff.
Actually some incomplete models that people mistakenly believe to complete. Sure, it looks like cells are just chemical machines, but until one has been built from scratch, that is just an idea, not a hard fact. And with intelligence and consciousness? For the latter there is no physical mechanism in the sense that physics simply does not apply. For the former, it increasingly looks like physics alone cannot do it either.
But then it occurred to me that it probably just seems longer.
Hehehehe, nice! That is why I eat read meat, do not exercise and did not get married. I am not much into dessert though, so some subjective life extension may apply.
it's the wrong level of description to be comparing to a neural network, The correct level of description is a detailed theoretical understanding of how a defined circuit of brain cells does things like generalization, pattern completion, pattern recognition, etc. That is something you can meaningfully compare to what in silico network is or may be capable of. When you do that you may realise that the circuit of brain cells is also not doing anything clever.
You are deep into the area of belief here as you assume, without proof or even good reason that "the circuit of brain cells is also not doing anything clever", despite ample indication to the contrary. In fact, we do not even know that it is merely a "circuit of brain cells" that produces these results. Again there is a lot of indication that it may not be and only a physicalist (unfunded, religious) assumption that it is.
This makes your argument circular: Assume the mental abilities of a human are created by a purely physical machine that does nothing special. Then you can conclude from that via a few intermediate steps that the mental abilities of a human are created by a purely physical machine that does nothing special. Completely meaningless.
Seriously, physicalism, as you just used, has no scientific basis. It is a pure religious-type approach to explaining reality by stating some fundamental "truths" without proof and then expecting everybody to believe them as "obvious". No good scientist would ever support that.
They do not. They are faster and cheaper, but classification quality is worse, except for specially crafted tasks. And humans can do a lot of other things as well, while neural nets cannot. If that is "getting beaten", then I have no problem with it. A hammer beats me at driving nails into a board, but that does cause me no concern whatsoever.
Human beings are fundamentally better at this type of classification tasks. Neural nets have no chance of ever matching them, and it is not a question of computing power. There is a fundamental difference in the quality of the problem, which humans usually describe as "recognizing the nature of the thing" or something like it, and there is no computer equivalent for that. It seems to be a process involving consciousness in humans.
That is not to say that neural nets are useless. They just do not do anything intelligent, they are merely statistical classificators that can be trained instead of parametrized. That makes them cheaper, but not better.
Fully agree to that. The thing is that pattern recognition with neural nets is an entirely mechanical process, it does not resemble anything humans can do at all. It has no understanding of what it does at all.
I do agree that the term "AI" has now been so warped by the media and the public that it is worthless. Even "strong AI" or "true AI" are getting compromised. The thing to remember is that "AI" does not mean anything resembling human intelligence, but is something entirely different.
Nobody knows how humans do what they can do. And the neural nets on these machines are massively and fundamentally different from what is found in the brain. Some base understanding required though.
This is a comparison of the D-Wave with a simulation of the Quantum Algorithm on a classical computer.
This is nonsense! You really have to compare the best known algorithms for each machine in order to get any meaningful results. Turns out that that the classical algorithm still wipes the floor with the D-Wave on a moderately powerful single core PC when the comparison is fair.
This factor is not even a strong proof that the D-Wave is using quantum effects, just that it simulates them very well.
The truly pathetic thing here is the press, which has not caught on to this misdirection, despite this being the second or third time they have done such worthless comparisons and this being stated clearly in the paper.
In this case whoever made the press release and indicated any real-world speedup. Not a direct lie, but gross misdirection.
The paper is actually honest and admits that they are not faster than a classical computer AT ALL: "Based on the results presented here, one cannot claim a quantum speedup for D-Wave 2X, as this would require that the quantum processor in question outperforms the best known classical algorithm."
The thing is, the D-Wave is only faster than a simulation of the Quantum Algorithm on a classical computer. Running the same problem with the best known classical computer, the D-Wave has its ass handed to it by a moderately powerful laptop, which is something like 1000x cheaper.
So far CS research is even struggling to create Artificial Stupidity. No AI that deserves the name anywhere in sight, not even as a credible theoretical model.
Calling neural nets "AI" is about as far removed from what that term implies as possibly without leaving the area of classificators. The only thing neural nets do is if you show them enough examples from a specific thing, they eventually have a good chance to recognize other instances of that thing. No intelligence involved, just pattern matching were you can train the patterns instead of having to configure them.
This seems to be a good comparison. One problem with rewriting things from scratch is that it is hard to find out what the old code actually does. In many cases you will end up with worse code, not better code, due to the old code having a log of maturity and most of its problems being known.
Well, yes, from that perspective that move makes some sense. While it does a lot of damage, this may actually not be avoidable.
You are quite wrong. For symmetric ciphers, a working universal QC just reduces the number of bits to half. AES-256 is secure against a QC just fine. For public key crypto, you need at the very least enough bits to fit the modulus in there. For example for 2048 bit RSA that is at least 2048 bits.
Many people in the legal profession have this delusion that they, via laws, make and shape reality. Of course they do not. They can provide motivation for certain behaviors, but that is it. Making a law does not change physical and mathematical reality one bit. But seeing that takes actual understanding and people like Feinstein do not have that.
It can attempt to modify behavior of people but that is it. Reality stands above the law and people that seem to think different (like Feinstein) are delusional.
The reality of the matter is that you can have secure crypto or backdoored crypto. The latter is insecure and can be attacked by any number of attackers. There is _no_ way around that. (For details, look up the discussion the crypto experts have had on this in the last few years.)
Backdoored crypto is hence a gross risk and far, far worse than not being able to read every message desired.
Sorry, but the flashlight does compute. Its function is an approximation of "battery not empty" AND "lightbulb not broken" AND "switch on" THEN "shine light".
This should amply demonstrate that your definition of "computer" is so broad it is completely meaningless and hence useless.
Slashdot Mirror
"Number of errors" is a meaningless metric. You need to take severity, cost of fixing, cost of finding, and damage done into account. But MBA bean-counters cannot do that, as they do not understand anything they are "managing".
Whether this is design or natural selection/optimization is immaterial. The question is stupid though.
Actually some incomplete models that people mistakenly believe to complete. Sure, it looks like cells are just chemical machines, but until one has been built from scratch, that is just an idea, not a hard fact.
We are indeed . I think you're greatly underestimating what we've learned since the 1950s if you think it amounts to "just an idea".
I am abreast of the pertaining scientific advancement. They are impressive, but they do not say that we understand the mechanisms involved fully or even mostly. You are misinterpreting them. This is not "creating life from scratch". It is about comparable to doing a BIOS update. That does not mean you know what you are doing and why it works or what the rest of the computer actually does. It does not even make you sure (if you are smart) that what you worked on is a computer.
And with intelligence and consciousness? For the latter there is no physical mechanism in the sense that physics simply does not apply. For the former, it increasingly looks like physics alone cannot do it either.
If not ultimately physics then what?
Unknown at this time. That you do not know how something works is not a valid excuse to fall back to something you know and claim that it must be how things are. You need proof for that. Elimination does not cut it, unless you fully understand the system you are reasoning about. It is amply clear that we do not.
A bit like now, since the revolutions in molecular biology, genetics, and developmental biology, most people no longer consider "what is life" to be such a deep question. Nowadays anyone with an education in these fields really knows quite well what "life" is. There's no big shocking mystery there, just an enormous quantity of really complicated stuff.
Actually some incomplete models that people mistakenly believe to complete. Sure, it looks like cells are just chemical machines, but until one has been built from scratch, that is just an idea, not a hard fact. And with intelligence and consciousness? For the latter there is no physical mechanism in the sense that physics simply does not apply. For the former, it increasingly looks like physics alone cannot do it either.
Update: Here is a really good summary of what is going on:
http://www.scottaaronson.com/b...
tl;dr: Nice research, no practical speed-ups, unclear whether the D-WAVE can even achieve any real speed-up.
But then it occurred to me that it probably just seems longer.
Hehehehe, nice! That is why I eat read meat, do not exercise and did not get married. I am not much into dessert though, so some subjective life extension may apply.
it's the wrong level of description to be comparing to a neural network, The correct level of description is a detailed theoretical understanding of how a defined circuit of brain cells does things like generalization, pattern completion, pattern recognition, etc. That is something you can meaningfully compare to what in silico network is or may be capable of. When you do that you may realise that the circuit of brain cells is also not doing anything clever.
You are deep into the area of belief here as you assume, without proof or even good reason that "the circuit of brain cells is also not doing anything clever", despite ample indication to the contrary. In fact, we do not even know that it is merely a "circuit of brain cells" that produces these results. Again there is a lot of indication that it may not be and only a physicalist (unfunded, religious) assumption that it is.
This makes your argument circular: Assume the mental abilities of a human are created by a purely physical machine that does nothing special. Then you can conclude from that via a few intermediate steps that the mental abilities of a human are created by a purely physical machine that does nothing special. Completely meaningless.
Seriously, physicalism, as you just used, has no scientific basis. It is a pure religious-type approach to explaining reality by stating some fundamental "truths" without proof and then expecting everybody to believe them as "obvious". No good scientist would ever support that.
They do not. They are faster and cheaper, but classification quality is worse, except for specially crafted tasks. And humans can do a lot of other things as well, while neural nets cannot. If that is "getting beaten", then I have no problem with it. A hammer beats me at driving nails into a board, but that does cause me no concern whatsoever.
Human beings are fundamentally better at this type of classification tasks. Neural nets have no chance of ever matching them, and it is not a question of computing power. There is a fundamental difference in the quality of the problem, which humans usually describe as "recognizing the nature of the thing" or something like it, and there is no computer equivalent for that. It seems to be a process involving consciousness in humans.
That is not to say that neural nets are useless. They just do not do anything intelligent, they are merely statistical classificators that can be trained instead of parametrized. That makes them cheaper, but not better.
Fully agree to that. The thing is that pattern recognition with neural nets is an entirely mechanical process, it does not resemble anything humans can do at all. It has no understanding of what it does at all.
I do agree that the term "AI" has now been so warped by the media and the public that it is worthless. Even "strong AI" or "true AI" are getting compromised. The thing to remember is that "AI" does not mean anything resembling human intelligence, but is something entirely different.
Nobody knows how humans do what they can do. And the neural nets on these machines are massively and fundamentally different from what is found in the brain. Some base understanding required though.
This is a comparison of the D-Wave with a simulation of the Quantum Algorithm on a classical computer.
This is nonsense! You really have to compare the best known algorithms for each machine in order to get any meaningful results. Turns out that that the classical algorithm still wipes the floor with the D-Wave on a moderately powerful single core PC when the comparison is fair.
This factor is not even a strong proof that the D-Wave is using quantum effects, just that it simulates them very well.
The truly pathetic thing here is the press, which has not caught on to this misdirection, despite this being the second or third time they have done such worthless comparisons and this being stated clearly in the paper.
In this case whoever made the press release and indicated any real-world speedup. Not a direct lie, but gross misdirection.
The paper is actually honest and admits that they are not faster than a classical computer AT ALL: "Based on the results presented here, one cannot claim a quantum speedup for D-Wave 2X, as this would require that the quantum processor in question outperforms the best known classical algorithm."
The thing is, the D-Wave is only faster than a simulation of the Quantum Algorithm on a classical computer. Running the same problem with the best known classical computer, the D-Wave has its ass handed to it by a moderately powerful laptop, which is something like 1000x cheaper.
So far CS research is even struggling to create Artificial Stupidity. No AI that deserves the name anywhere in sight, not even as a credible theoretical model.
Calling neural nets "AI" is about as far removed from what that term implies as possibly without leaving the area of classificators. The only thing neural nets do is if you show them enough examples from a specific thing, they eventually have a good chance to recognize other instances of that thing. No intelligence involved, just pattern matching were you can train the patterns instead of having to configure them.
It is not. That is my whole point. But even more so, it is not the amount of universality and flexibility expected.
This seems to be a good comparison. One problem with rewriting things from scratch is that it is hard to find out what the old code actually does. In many cases you will end up with worse code, not better code, due to the old code having a log of maturity and most of its problems being known.
Well, yes, from that perspective that move makes some sense. While it does a lot of damage, this may actually not be avoidable.
Waaah, a terrorist! Grab him! He uses slashdot to communicate with his evil associates!
Control freak? Senile?
Indeed. Happens to any failing empire sooner or later: They become irrelevant before they die.
You are quite wrong. For symmetric ciphers, a working universal QC just reduces the number of bits to half. AES-256 is secure against a QC just fine. For public key crypto, you need at the very least enough bits to fit the modulus in there. For example for 2048 bit RSA that is at least 2048 bits.
Many people in the legal profession have this delusion that they, via laws, make and shape reality. Of course they do not. They can provide motivation for certain behaviors, but that is it. Making a law does not change physical and mathematical reality one bit. But seeing that takes actual understanding and people like Feinstein do not have that.
It can attempt to modify behavior of people but that is it. Reality stands above the law and people that seem to think different (like Feinstein) are delusional.
The reality of the matter is that you can have secure crypto or backdoored crypto. The latter is insecure and can be attacked by any number of attackers. There is _no_ way around that. (For details, look up the discussion the crypto experts have had on this in the last few years.)
Backdoored crypto is hence a gross risk and far, far worse than not being able to read every message desired.
I have. There are different critics out there that say different things.
Sorry, but the flashlight does compute. Its function is an approximation of "battery not empty" AND "lightbulb not broken" AND "switch on" THEN "shine light".
This should amply demonstrate that your definition of "computer" is so broad it is completely meaningless and hence useless.