Wikipedia: Moravec's Paradox

cousin_it

Linky. Quotes:

Moravec's paradox is the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources.

[...]

We should expect the difficulty of reverse-engineering any human skill to be roughly proportional to the amount of time that skill has been evolving in animals.

The oldest human skills are largely unconscious and so appear to us to be effortless.

Therefore, we should expect skills that appear effortless to be difficult to reverse-engineer, but skills that require effort may not necessarily be difficult to engineer at all.

Linky. Quotes:

Moravec's paradox is the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources.

[...]

We should expect the difficulty of reverse-engineering any human skill to be roughly proportional to the amount of time that skill has been evolving in animals.

The oldest human skills are largely unconscious and so appear to us to be effortless.

Therefore, we should expect skills that appear effortless to be difficult to reverse-engineer, but skills that require effort may not necessarily be difficult to engineer at all.

I suspect you misunderstand my argument, and I definitely fail to understand yours. How would convergent evolution support the claim you quoted?

... it could simply be that evolution uses what was already there.

I was assuming that. But I was also assuming something that may not be true. I was assuming that (back in the Cambrian) there were a variety of neural architectures for locomotion "already there". And that beasties using each of those architectures were offered the opportunity to adaptively radiate into new niches requiring new forms of locomotion. And that some succeeded in adapting and some didn't. And that the ones that succeeded did so because they had an 'elegant' or 'modular' neural architecture.

In some sense, this is selection for ability to evolve. This is something of a controversial idea in evolutionary theory, but in the form I have presented it, it shouldn't be very controversial.

I suspect you misunderstand my argument

Were you claiming that those neural algorithms are thus algorithmically efficient/optimal?

I was assuming that (back in the Cambrian) there were a variety of neural architectures for locomotion "already there".

Ah yes, I didn't know you were assuming that. Unfortunately that doesn't seem very plausible to me. It seems more likely that the locomotion algorithm we see in many species today was a once-in-natural-history luck-out on the part of evolution. Even assuming rival algorithms appeared on the scen... (read more)

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Wikipedia: Moravec's Paradox

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Wikipedia: Moravec's Paradox

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