Good_Burning_Plastic comments on The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine - Less Wrong
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It's not that crappy given that newborns can not only recognize faces with significant accuracy, but also recognize facial expressions.
Having two separate face recognition modules, one genetically specified and another learned seems redundant, and still it's not obvious to me how a genetically-specified sexual attraction program could find how to plug into a completely learned system, which would necessarily have some degree of randomness.
It seems more likely that there is a single face recognition module which is genetically specified and then it becomes fine tuned by learning.
Show a neolithic human a bunch of pebbles, some black and some white, laid out in a line. Ask them to add a black or white pebble to the line, and reward them if the number of black pebbles is even. Repeat multiple times.
Even without a concept of "even number", wouldn't this neolithic human be able to figure out an algorithm to compute the right answer? They just need to scan the line, flipping a mental switch for each black pebble they encounter, and then add a black pebble if and only if the switch is not in the initial position.
Maybe I'm overgeneralizing, but it seems unlikely to me that people able to invent complex hunting strategies, to build weapons, tools, traps, clothing, huts, to participate in tribe politics, etc. wouldn't be able to figure something like that.
Well, given how hard it is for Haitians to understand numerical sorting...
If I understand correctly, in the post you linked Scott is saying that Haitians are functionally innumerate, which should explain the difficulties with numerical sorting.
My point is that the partity function should be learnable even without basic numeracy, although I admit that perhaps I'm overgeneralizing.
Anyway, modern machine learning systems can learn to perform basic arithmentic such as addition and subtraction, and I think even sorting (since they are used for preordering for statstical machine translation), hence the problem doesn't seem to be a lack of arithmetic knowledge or skill.
Note that both addition and subtraction have constant circuit depth (they are in AC0) while parity has logarithmic circuit depth.