= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Viliam_Bur comments on Why AI may not foom - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (78)
Thanks for your comments. How do you think human intelligence works? Perhaps by doing a massive parallel search to approximate the best solution?
I'm confused... if time required is a polynomial or exponential function of your problem size, then hardware that runs twice as fast will still solve your problem twice as fast, won't it? (How could it not?) And if the algorithm you're using to solve the problem is perfectly parallelizable (which I grant to AI foom proponents 'cause it seems plausible to me), then throwing twice the hardware at any given problem will solve it twice as fast. (Although yes, it will not solve problems that are twice as big.)
This is just an educated guess, but to me massive parallel search feels very unlikely for human intelligence. To do something "massive parallel", you need a lot of (almost) identical hardware. If you want to run the same algorithm 100 times in parallel, you need 100 instances of the (almost) same hardware. Otherwise -- how can you run that in parallel?
Some parts of human brain work like that, as far as I know. The visual part of the brain, specifically. There are many neurons implementing the same task: scanning an input from a part of retina, detecting lines, edges, and whatever. This is why image recognition is extremely fast and requires a large part of the brain dedicated to this task.
Seems to me (but I am not an expert) that most of the brain functionality is not like this. Especially the parts related to thinking. Thinking is usually slow and needs to be learned -- which is the exact opposite of how the massively parallelized parts work.
EDIT: Unless by massive parallel human intelligence you meant multiple people working on the same problem.
I'm not an expert either, but from what I've read on the subject, most of the neocortex does work like this. The architecture used in the visual cortex is largely the same as that used in the rest of the cortex, with some minor variations. This is suggested by the fact that people who lose an area of their neocortex are often able to recover, with another area filling in for it. I'm on a phone, so I can't go into as much detail as I'd like, but I recommend investigating the work of Mountcastle, and more recently Markram.
Edit: On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins explains this principle in more depth, it's an interesting read.