Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagMap vs. territory

Artificial Intelligence Playing Go

The Game-Playing AI Does Not Always Win, It Turns Out

Enterprising researchers beat KataGo at Go by taking advantage of its known blind spots

At Vice, science writer Tatyana Woodall tells us that clever researchers developed a rival adversarial AI to trick KataGo into losing games: Players have often used KataGo to test their skills, train for other matches, and even analyze past games, yet in a study posted recently on the preprint server arXiv, researchers report that by using an adversarial policy—a kind of machine-learning algorithm built to attack or learn weaknesses in other systems—they’ve been able to beat KataGo at its own game between 50 to 99 percent of the time, depending on how much “thinking ahead” the AI does. Funnily enough, the new system doesn’t win by trumping KataGo all out, but instead by forcing KataGo into a corner, essentially tricking Read More ›

Shot of Corridor in Working Data Center Full of Rack Servers and Supercomputers with Pink Neon Visualization Projection of Data Transmission Through High Speed Internet.
Shot of Corridor in Working Data Center Full of Rack Servers and Supercomputers with Pink Neon Visualization Projection of Data Transmission Through High Speed Internet.

AI Researcher: Stop Calling Everything “Artificial Intelligence”

It’s not really intelligence, says Berkeley’s Michael Jordan, and we risk misunderstanding what these machines can really do for us

Computer scientist Michael I. Jordan, a leading AI researcher, says today’s artificial intelligence systems aren’t actually intelligent and people should stop talking about them as if they were: They are showing human-level competence in low-level pattern recognition skills, but at the cognitive level they are merely imitating human intelligence, not engaging deeply and creatively, says Michael I. Jordan, a leading researcher in AI and machine learning. Jordan is a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, and the department of statistics, at the University of California, Berkeley. Katy Pretz, “Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says” at IEEE Spectrum (March 31, 2031) Their principal role, he says, is to “augment human intelligence, via painstaking analysis of large Read More ›

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Fembot Robot Playing Chess with Woman

Are Computers That Win at Chess Smarter Than Geniuses?

No, and we need to look at why they can win at chess without showing even basic common sense

Big computers conquered chess quite easily. But then there was the Chinese game of go (pictured), estimated to be 4000 years old, which offers more “degrees of freedom” (possible moves, strategy, and rules) than chess (2×10170). As futurist George Gilder tells us, in Gaming AI, it was a rite of passage for aspiring intellects in Asia: “Go began as a rigorous rite of passage for Chinese gentlemen and diplomats, testing their intellectual skills and strategic prowess. Later, crossing the Sea of Japan, Go enthralled the Shogunate, which brought it into the Japanese Imperial Court and made it a national cult.” (p. 9) Then AlphaGo, from Google’s DeepMind, appeared on the scene in 2016: As the Chinese American titan Kai-Fu Lee Read More ›

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top view of modern intelligence city

Maps Are Not Territories and Reality Needn’t Follow Our Rules

These assumptions are just two more tales from the AI apocalypse, as George Gilder tells it, in Gaming AI.

Yesterday, we looked at two of the six assumptions that, according to George Gilder (pictured) in Gaming AI, are generally shared by those who believe that we will merge with our machines in a Singularity. These first two assumptions were: The brain is a computer and Big Data is a Big Answer. Now here are two more: • “The Binary Reality Assumption: Reliable links exist between maps and territories, computational symbols, and their objects.” (p. 50) Basically, this assumption means that reality will somehow always phone the computer’s map to say that things have changed. That assumption underlies the push for self-driving cars that can handle any terrain (Level 5). The machine is to handle all possibilities, including remote, unmapped Read More ›

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Getting to know the neighbors at the country houses in village

Why Is AI a Key Battleground in Philosophy and Religion?

Tech philosopher George Gilder explains. Spoiler: He thinks humans will win

In this week’s podcast, Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks interviews futurist George Gilder on “How AI is gaming intelligence.” Their discussion stems from Gilder’s new book, Gaming AI: Why AI Can’t Think But Can Transform Jobs (free for download here). https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-105-George-Gilder.mp3 From the transcript: (Show Notes, Resources, and a link to the complete transcript follow.) Robert J. Marks (pictured): In general, do you see AI as a new demotion of the human race? This is pretty serious prose. George Gilder: Well, it declares that the human mind is just a machine that can be simulated by computer algorithms … thus demoting the human endeavor from being the center of everything, to becoming a mere planet of a larger Read More ›

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Artificial Intelligence. Composition on the subject of Future Technologies. 3d rendered graphics.

Why AI Geniuses Haven’t Created True Thinking Machines

The problems have been hinting at themselves all along

As we saw yesterday, artificial intelligence (AI) has enjoyed a a string of unbroken successes against humans. But these are successes in games where the map is the territory. Therefore, everything is computable. That fact hints at the problem tech philosopher and futurist George Gilder raises in Gaming AI (free download here). Whether all human activities can be treated that way successfully is an entirely different question. As Gilder puts it, “AI is a system built on the foundations of computer logic, and when Silicon Valley’s AI theorists push the logic of their case to a “singularity,” they defy the most crucial findings of twentieth-century mathematics and computer science.” Here is one of the crucial findings they defy (or ignore): Read More ›