Humans 1 Computers 0

[Shaddy]

Maybe I am not the strongest player but I can't see how white can win this.

Found the computer.

[Drew]

Everyone involved in the Penrose project are likely orders of magnitude smarter than I am, and yet I find this line of thinking:

1. design strange chess problem
2. existing computer chess programs are confused
3. human brains are quantum computers

to be an incredible failure of imagination. Why was the first instinct not to simply tear down the software and see why it's choking? To magic up "because quantum brains" is, I feel, arrogant in the extreme.

Also, @Shaddy, your avatar seems a bit misinformed Wikipedia: Red Bananas are definitely a (tasty!) thing

[Monadology]

Everyone involved in the Penrose project are likely orders of magnitude smarter than I am, and yet I find this line of thinking:

1. design strange chess problem
2. existing computer chess programs are confused
3. human brains are quantum computers

to be an incredible failure of imagination. Why was the first instinct not to simply tear down the software and see why it's choking? To magic up "because quantum brains" is, I feel, arrogant in the extreme.

Also, @Shaddy, your avatar seems a bit misinformed Wikipedia: Red Bananas are definitely a (tasty!) thing

I think what you're missing is that in the background are more significant indicators (to Penrose) that human brains can solve problems that no mechanical machine can (the move to quantum computing from just this argument, even if successful, is still a bit of a leap). In summary, elsewhere, Penrose has made arguments that the human brain cannot be (and can't be modeled by) a Turing machine or any machine that a Turing machine can model by appealing to facts about what is involved in the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorems (see here for a brief explanation).

To be clear, this doesn't allow for any direct argument from the chess position to the hypothesis that the human brain is not a mechanical computer, but I guess Penrose considers it to be weakly confirming evidence, in light of what he takes to be a stronger argument (see above), because it shows yet another case where mechanistic computers seem to be limited in comparison to human brains.

[Shaddy]

Everyone involved in the Penrose project are likely orders of magnitude smarter than I am, and yet I find this line of thinking:

1. design strange chess problem
2. existing computer chess programs are confused
3. human brains are quantum computers

to be an incredible failure of imagination. Why was the first instinct not to simply tear down the software and see why it's choking? To magic up "because quantum brains" is, I feel, arrogant in the extreme.

Also, @Shaddy, your avatar seems a bit misinformed Wikipedia: Red Bananas are definitely a (tasty!) thing

Yeah, I've come across red bananas in the supermarket since starting to use this avatar. It might be time for a change.

[Bill Spight]

To be clear, this doesn't allow for any direct argument from the chess position to the hypothesis that the human brain is not a mechanical computer, but I guess Penrose considers it to be weakly confirming evidence, in light of what he takes to be a stronger argument (see above), because it shows yet another case where mechanistic computers seem to be limited in comparison to human brains.

First, all confirming evidence is weak.

Second, this is not evidence of brain vs. computer, because it would not be difficult to write a program that could reason about such positions. Not that that program would be a strong chess player. Computer programs are limited not only by hardware, but by computer programmers. As we have seen with AlphaGo. Not that other programmers were bad, but it took a new combination of ideas to create AlphaGo.