pjeby comments on What I would like the SIAI to publish - Less Wrong

27 Post author: XiXiDu 01 November 2010 02:07PM

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Comment author: pjeby 02 November 2010 06:14:54PM 2 points [-]

Music is not narrow and Emily Howell is not comparable to a typical human musician.

The point is that it (and its predecessor Emmy) are special-purpose "idiot savants", like the other two examples. That it is not a human musician is beside the point: the point is that humans can make idiot-savant programs suitable for solving any sufficiently-specified problem, which means a human-level AI programmer can do the same.

And although real humans spent many years on some of these narrow-domain tools, an AI programmer might be able to execute those years in minutes.

Comment author: jmmcd 02 November 2010 07:48:46PM 2 points [-]

special-purpose "idiot savants", like the other two examples.

No, it's quite different from the other two examples. Deep Blue beat the world champion. The evolutionary computation-designed antenna was better than its human-designed competitors.

dumb brute force is already "smarter" than human beings in any narrow domain

To be precise, what sufficiently-specified compositional problem do you think Emily Howell solves better than humans? I say "compositional" to reassure you that I'm not going to move the goalposts by requiring "real emotion" or human-style performance gestures or anything like that.

Comment author: pjeby 03 November 2010 04:04:57AM 1 point [-]

To be precise, what sufficiently-specified compositional problem do you think Emily Howell solves better than humans?

If I understand correctly, the answer would be "making the music its author/co-composer wanted it to make".

(In retrospect, I probably should have said "Emmy" -- i.e., Emily's predecessor that could write classical pieces in the style of other composers.)

Comment author: jmmcd 03 November 2010 10:15:30PM 1 point [-]

To make that claim, we'd have to have one or more humans who sat down with David Cope and tried to make the music that he wanted, and failed. I don't think David Cope himself counts, because he has written music "by hand" also, and I don't think he regards it as a failure.

Re EMI/Emmy, it's clearer: the pieces it produced in the style of (say) Beethoven are not better than would be written by a typical human composer attempting the same task.

Now would be a good time for me to acknowledge/recall that my disagreement on this doesn't take away from the original point -- computers are better than humans on many narrow domains.