open apology to Uberdudethis morning i re-read through all the comments on this thread and suddenly saw Uberdude's comments in a new light.
i had replied somewhat acerbically when he quoted Baudis, who is not exactly the President of my fan club, which is hardly surprising, because there isn't one.
but Uberdude wasn't trolling me.
and indeed, Baudis may even have genuinely believed the absurd nonsense he wrote on his own grafitti wall about what i wrote on Gnugo's.
so i may owe him an apology too.
there is a third man... <<<<<<<<<<< one day, 20 years ago, [
redacted before submission] never seen before or since.
Henry Ford wrote:
history is bunk
>>>>>>>>>>>>>Back to the present, and my apology to Uberdude, whom i perceive to be a totally different character to she who must be obeyed:
His first comment in that thread is the one that showed me the mote in my own eye when i re-read it, because although at the time i had misunderstood his intentions in writing it, i've finally woken up to that fact.
he and i are (were) coming to the subject of computer Go - and AI in general - from different places, and using words differently.
in particular, the word
"think".
this little word opens up a whole can of worms, but - to me at least - it is a can worth looking into, as many many others have done before, even before Turing.
the mistake was mine, because in my post, i used the word in the sense in which i meant it, but - reasonably enough - Uberdude read into it (what i now infer to be) a very different, and much more particular, sense.
and indeed, the sense in which Uberdude was using it is common sense, whereas mine was not!!
the irony could hardly be more apposite
if the above makes no sense to you, that is explicable, because i didn't start at the beginning, but about halfway through and then got sidetracked on a redacted time travel. it's what they call a stream of consciousness (or flood of self-consciousness)
let me try to "please explain"...
the fault was mine from the outset, because in the post on which Uberdude commented, i had written:
Quote:
design of software able to think and talk about Go in a commonsense way,is described and illustrated
there it is, in black and white - or rather, dark grey and light grey.
what i should have written is this:
Quote:
design of software able to 'think' and talk about Go in a commonsense way,is described and illustrated
because Lewis Carrol's Humpty-Dumpty was spot on when he said to Alice:
Humpty-Dumpty wrote:
when i use a word, i use it to mean what I want it to mean. Neither more, nor less.
and - self-evidently it does not go without saying - Dodgson is showing his readers that what you mean when you say something is entirely irrelevant, because the only thing that matters is what the other person thinks you mean - and that is more often than not very different!
as it happens, in the dozens of drafts of my paper, i had several times vacillated between putting
think in quotes and not doing so. Eventually i settled on not, for after all, Turing hadn't, so why should i?
well, i now have the answer to that question - of course i should!!
many of those of you that haven't already switched off by now, if indeed there be any that started to read this in the first place, will probably be steaming: "Get to the point!"
yes, right, sorry, ok, here's what i mean:
Code:
1. there is a thing called "thinking"
2. people do it
3. BUT, they are not the only ones
4. even bacteria think!!
Because, "thinking" = processing information in a sensible way, so as to extract meaning from it, and - if you are smart enough - responding to it appropriately (which means in a way that is in your own best interests (or, rather, as that pea fellow and CD (not forgetting the other one who got there at the same time whose letter prompted him to publish but whose name he didnt even mention) and RD showed us, your selfish genome's best interests).
Bacteria meet all these requirements, when they sniff out whether to flagellate or not, depending on what it smells like around them.
Rotating (using the only known example of a biological wheel) its corkscrew-shaped flagellum clockwise propels a bacterium forwards, whereas rotating it anticlockwise makes it tumble in the ebb and flow of the sea it's in, which has a fair chance of it ending up pointing in a different direction.
In this way, a bacterium - let's call it E (short for E.coli) - can navigate chemical gradients, moving towards things that are good to eat, and away from things that are poisonous.
Guess what?! -
That's EXACTLY what Alfadog's reinforcement learning gradient ascent does!!!!Alfa's policy network is the computational electronic equivalent of E's sniffer, and her value network is the equivalent of E's tumbling or screwing, depending on what it detected, which is the biological equivalent of what Alfa imagines in her Monte-Carlo rollouts of possible futures.
Both of them use the principle that Ulam's flash of inspiration revealed to him all those years ago:
Eckhardt, Roger (1987). "Stan Ulam, John von Neumann, and the Monte Carlo method"
http://library.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?15-13.pdfLong before Ulam, there was another fellow who had an equally good idea. His name was Plato, and he wrote stories about an imaginary man called Socrates, who went around telling people he was mortal, which proved to be true, because, due to his annoying habit of tricking them into contradicting themselves, they eventually got so fed up about being made to look like fools to themselves, they forced him to commit suicide by drinking hemlock.
Plato was one of the first to write about what the Greeks called Logos - the notion that one thing can lead to another because the Universe ain't random, no matter what Schrödinger says.
Do bacteria use logic?
In one sense, they do - because their built-in associative machinery (learned by reinforcement learning across generations of evolution) does implement a form of Modus Ponens, which Russel and Whitehead (or was it Frege? i forget now) might have written like this:
Code:
Axioms:
A1. nice_smell implies nice
A2. nice implies i should flagellate
A3. flagellate implies ("well i don't actually know what it implies, i just do it")
Premiss:
1. exists (nice_smell)
Lemma:
L1: nice (1, A1, MP)
Conclusion:
flagellate (L1, A2, MP)
-some while later-
mmm... yummy!QED
... Q: Do people use logic?
A: Yes. (Homer uses exactly the above reinforcement learning learned logic in the latest episode of MiG).
Q: How do you know?
A: Because people have neurons, and neurons implement logical implication.
Q: Huh?!
A:
http://sites.google.com/site/djhbrown/H ... es/umb.pdf (Ch 13)
https://3fc9298e-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.goo ... C6to10.pdf pp198-229.
Q: So what?
A: Fair question; understanding how things work isn't needed to be able to use them. For example, i can drive a car without needing to know anything about Boyle's Law.
Q: I am Right and you are Wrong. Right? RIGHT?!!
A: If you say so; please don't hurt me (remembers de Bono)
Enter, stage left, the ghost of TuringT: To think, or not to think, that is the question
Q: No it's not! What the f are you talking about?
A: I think he means that thinking is something we think only people can do, but maybe it isn't. Maybe even a machine can...
Q: This is just stupid. Off course machines can't think - and even if they could, we're still better than them because we have consciousness, and feelings, which they can't because only i can have feelings because i'm me and i'm important and f you. I've had enough of this; I'm off to play with my stones.
several audience members, in chorus and sequence: He's right. They tried that before and it didn't work and it can't ever work, at least, not doing it that way, and your way is unintelligible and malconceived and ill-defined and just plain wrong and the same as theirs, regardless of your saying it isn't.
A: I wish i were as streetwise as Mr T, to know that the only way to make a statement even slightly acceptable is to express it as a question, rather than a statement.
Scene 2, May 2017, somewhere in China.crowd: gasp! isn't she beautiful!, omg, i can't believe it!!
MC: this is the most significant moment in the entire history of the world, for it signals the end of Man's dominion over the Earth and all the living things that dwell thereupon, and (house of) Ushers in the Dawn of the Age of the Machines.
voice at the back,
sotto voce: No, it doesn't.
<<<<<<flashback 18 months
hideous Hebdo satirist: Monte is great. I avow that there is only one Monte, and Monte shall be his name.
Pope B: You are hereby excommunicated and commanded to neither say nor think said heresy again, and if you fail in this, you will be shown the instruments of torture.
>>>>>>flashforward
crowd: Kill him!
T: which one?
Curtain falls.Q: Have you finished??!
A: This isn't the end. It isn't even the end of the beginning. Nor is it the beginning of the end (digital oxymorons that only a moron with two fingers in the air would say, because Time flows smoothly - my brother Esau is an hairy man, but i am a smooth man - like an arrow, not in mythical Planck steps (regrettably still the only half-decent model we have, 117 years old and still spluttering along)), but it might be the beginning of the beginning.
Q: Pffft! - what's on the other side?