jhuffman comments on For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books - Less Wrong

35 Post author: MichaelVassar 02 March 2010 08:11AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (102)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: jhuffman 05 March 2010 08:35:43PM *  0 points [-]

Imagine yourself studying a 4 megapixel digital image only by looking at it one pixel at a time. Yes, you can look at it, and then even write down what color it was. Later you can refer back to this list and see what color a particular pixel was. Its hard to remember more than a few dozen at once though, so how will you ever have a complete picture of it in your head?

Comment author: JamesAndrix 06 March 2010 02:07:55AM 1 point [-]

I could find and write down a set of instructions that would allow you to determine if there was a face in the image. If you were immortal and I were smarter, I could write down a set of instructions that might enable you to derive the physics of the photographed universe given a few frames.

At this level it's like the Chinese room.

But I don't think the ratio between Einstein's working memory and a normal person's working memory is 100,000 to 1.

It would be EASY to make instructions to find faces even if someone could only see and remember 1/16th of the image at a time. You get tons of image processing for free. "Is there a dark circle surrounded by a color?"

A human runnable algorithm to turn data into concepts would be different in structure, but not in kind.