Houshalter comments on Superintelligence Reading Group - Section 1: Past Developments and Present Capabilities - Less Wrong

25 Post author: KatjaGrace 16 September 2014 01:00AM

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Comment author: KatjaGrace 16 September 2014 01:19:04AM 5 points [-]

'The computer scientist Donald Knuth was struck that "AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires 'thinking' but has failed to do most of what people and animals do 'without thinking' - that, somehow, is so much harder!'. (p14) There are some activities we think of as involving substantial thinking that we haven't tried to automate much, presumably because they require some of the 'not thinking' skills as precursors. For instance, theorizing about the world, making up grand schemes, winning political struggles, and starting successful companies. If we had successfully automated the 'without thinking' tasks like vision and common sense, do you think these remaining kinds of thinking tasks would come easily to AI - like chess in a new domain - or be hard like the 'without thinking' tasks?

Comment author: Houshalter 07 June 2015 03:07:02AM *  0 points [-]

I think by "things that require thinking" he means logical problems in well defined domains. Computers can solve logical puzzles much faster than humans, often through sheer brute force. From board games to scheduling to finding the shortest path.

Of course there are counter examples like theorem proving or computer programming. Though they are improving and starting to match humans at some tasks.