You’re ignoring fundamental limits of computing efficiency here.
You’re assuming we’re at the fundamental limits of computing efficiency. If we are, power is essentially instructions per second. If not, it’s less useful than instructions per second. You might as well just say instructions per second and ignore power.
For what it’s worth, I’m not unimpressed because of the computing power used. I’m unimpressed because of the inflexibility of the program. If we built a true AI using the combined might of every computer on the planet, that would be impressive. Limiting computing power makes creating intelligence harder, but no matter how much you have, it’s far from easy. Chess can be brute forced, but intelligence can’t.
(I know Watson isn’t a chess program, and is far more impressive than one, but it’s still nothing compared to true AI.)
I disagree that intelligence can’t be brute forced, at least if you don’t care about computational resources. Presumably, what we mean by ‘intelligence’ is the passing of some Turing test (otherwise, if you just define ‘intelligence’ to be passing a Turing test with some kind of “elegance” in the design of the program, then your claim is true but only because you defined it to be that way).
If computational resources truly weren’t bounded, then we could build a massively inefficient lookup table whose search grows exponentially (or worse) in the length of the input. See this paper and this one for arguments about how to bound the complexity of such a lookup table argument. This paper is also very useful and the writing style is great.
What you cannot do, however, is claim that intelligence cannot be brute forced (again, under the assumption we ignore resources), without some appeal to computational complexity theory.
In particular, the Aaronson paper points out that according to Searle’s (flawed) Chinese room argument and Ned Block’s criticisms of the Turing test, complexity theory puts us in the situation where it is exactly the efficiency of an algorithm that gives it the property we ascribe to intelligence. We only know something’s intelligent because any reasonable Turing test that “respects” human intelligence will also function like a zero-knowledge proof that any agent who can pass the test does not have an algorithm that’s exponential in the size of the input.
Watson achieves the necessary speed (for the greatly restricted test of playing Jeopardy) but as you mentioned, Watson is easy to unmask simply by asking for the second or third best answers. However, in terms of complexity theory, Watson’s program fails the Turing test detrimentally… the program’s resource efficiency is dismal compared to humans. It’s doing something ‘stupid’ like a slow lookup with some correlations and statistical search. With similar resources to a human, this approach would be doomed to failure, so IBM just scaled up the resources until this bad approach no longer failed on the desired test cases.
Thus, if you would want to use ‘intelligence’ to label a planet sized computer which solves human Turing tests by brute forcing them with tremendously outrageous resource consumption, this would be a fundamental departure from what the literature I linked above considers ‘intelligence.’ If the planet-sized computer did fancy, efficient algorithms, then its massive resources would imply it can blow away human performance. The Turing test should be testing for the “general capacity” to do something, whether by lookup table or some equally stupid way, or by efficient intelligence.
Complexity theory really plays a large large role in all this. I would also add that I see no reason not to call a massive look-up table intelligent… assuming it is implemented in some kind of hardware and architecture that’s much better than anything human’s know about. If it turned out that human minds, for example, were some kind of quantum gravity look-up table (I absolutely do not believe this at all, but just for the sake of argument) I would not instantly believe that humans are not intelligent.
Thus, if you would want to use ‘intelligence’ to label a planet sized computer which solves human Turing tests by brute forcing them with tremendously outrageous resource consumption, this would be a fundamental departure from what the literature I linked above considers ‘intelligence.’
A planet-sized computer isn’t big enough to brute-force a Turing test. At least, it isn’t big enough to build a look-up table. Actually brute forcing a Turing test would require figuring out how the human would react to each possible output, in which case you’ve already solved AI.
If you had nigh infinite computing power you could create AIXI trivially. If you had quite a bit less, but still nigh infinite, computing power and programming time you could create a lookup table. If you had a planet-sized computer, you could probably create a virtual world in which intelligence evolves, though it would be far from trivial. Anything less than that, and it’s a nigh insurmountable task.
Increasing the computing power would make it easier, in that it wouldn’t make it harder, but within any reasonable bounds it’s not going to help much.
I would also add that I see no reason not to call a massive look-up table intelligent… assuming it is implemented in some kind of hardware and architecture that’s much better than anything human’s know about.
Because regardless of software inefficiency, unless the hardware is able to produce solutions in real time, it can’t pass a Turing test. A massive look-up table would be just fine as an intelligence if it had the hardware throughput to do its exponential searches fast enough to answer in real time, the way a human does.
If you had a planet-sized computer, you could probably create a virtual world in which intelligence evolves, though it would be far from trivial.
No, not even close. A planet sized computer is not even close to being up to that task, both the Parberry paper and Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument papers refute that quantitatively.
A planet-sized computer isn’t big enough to brute-force a Turing test.
It depends on the Turing test. The Shieber paper shows that you are correct if the Turing test is “carry out a 5 minute long English conversation on unrestricted topics” but Watson says you’re wrong if the Turing test is “win at Jeopardy.” Both the test and the hardware matter.
Actually brute forcing a Turing test would require figuring out how the human would react to each possible output, in which case you’ve already solved AI.
Not true. It just requires coming up with an algorithmic shortcut that mimics a plausible human output. Just think of the Eliza chatbox that fooled people into believing it was a psychologist just by parroting their statements back as questions. Even after being told about it, many people refused to believe they had not just been talking to a psychologist … and yet, almost no one today would ascribe intelligence to Eliza.
A planet-sized computer doing dumb search in a lookup table built around some cute algorithmic tricks could mimic human output extremely well, especially in restricted domains. How would we unmask it as unintelligent? Suppose a company used it as a customer service chatbot for conversations never lasting more than 1 minute, and that its heuristics and massive search were adequate for coming up with appropriate replies to 99.999% of the conversations it would face of length up to 1 minute. As soon as you know the way its software works and that its ability is purely based on scaling up dumb software with lots of hardware, you’d declare it unintelligent. Prior to that, though, it would be indistinguishable from a human in 1 minute or less conversations.
A massive look-up table would be just fine as an intelligence if it had the hardware throughput to do its exponential searches fast enough to answer in real time, the way a human does.
Isn’t that like saying that air would be just fine as an intelligence, if you told a person the questions you were going to use during the Turing test and how much time you would take asking each one (and your hypothetical responses to their hypothetical responses, etc.) if only sound waves could be recorded and replayed at precisely the right time? Which they can be, though that is beside the point.
A look up table is functionally absolute evidence of intelligence without being at all intelligent just as air is for a Turing test between two humans.
I think my point was not clearly communicated, because that section is not relevant to this.
That section is about how just about any instance of a medium could be interpreted as just about any message by some possible minds. It picks an instance of a medium and fits a message and listener to the instance of a medium.
I am suggesting something much more normal: first you pick a particular listener (the normal practice in communication) and particular message, and I can manipulate the listener’s customary medium to give the particular listener the particular message. In this case, many different messages would be acceptable, so much the easier.
When administering a Turing test, why do you say it is the human on the other terminal that is intelligent, rather than their keyboard, or the administrator’s eyeballs? For the same reasons, a look up table is not intelligent.
When administering a Turing test, why do you say it is the human on the other terminal that is intelligent, rather than their keyboard, or the administrator’s eyeballs? For the same reasons, a look up table is not intelligent.
First of all, the “systems reply” to Searle’s Chinese room argument is exactly the argument that the whole room, Searle plus the book plus the room itself, is intelligent and does understand Chinese, regardless of whether or not Searle does. Since such a situation has never occured with human-to-human interaction, it’s never been relevant for us to reconsider whether what we think is a human interacting with us really is intelligent. It’s easy to envision a future like Blade Runner where bots are successful enough that more sophisticated tests are needed to determine if something is intelligent. And this absolutely involves speed of the hardware.
Also, how do you know that a person isn’t a lookup table?
Would you say that neurosurgery is “teaching”, if one manipulates the brain’s bits such that the patient knows a new fact?
Also, how do you know that a person isn’t a lookup table?
The probability is low that a person is a lookup table based on the rules of physics for which the probability is high. If someone is a lookup table controlled remotely from another universe with incomprehensibly more matter than ours, or similar...so what? That just means an intelligence arranged the lookup table and it did not arise by random, high-entropy coincidence, one can say this with probability as close to absolute as it gets. Whatever arranged the lookup table may have arisen by a random, high-entropy process, like evolution, but so what?
And this absolutely involves speed of the hardware.
Something arbitrarily slow may still be intelligent, by any normal meaning. More things are intelligent than pass the Turing test (unless it is merely offered as a definition) just as more things fly than are birds.
It’s easy to envision a future like Blade Runner where bots are successful enough that more sophisticated tests are needed to determine if something is intelligent.
If the laws of physics are very different than I think they are, one could fit a lookup table inside a human-sized body. That would not make it intelligent any more than expanding the size of a human brain would make it cease to be intelligent. That wouldn’t prevent a robot from operating analogously to a human other than being on a different substrate, either.
What do you mean when you say “intelligence”? If you mean something performing the same functions as what we agree is intelligence given a contrived enough situation, I agree a lookup table could perform that function.
The problem with what I think is your definition isn’t the physical impossibility of creating the lookup table, but that once the informational output to an input is informationally as complex as it will ever be, anything transformation happening afterwards isn’t reasonably intelligence. The whole system of the lookup table’s creator and the lookup table may perhaps be described as an intelligent system, but not the fingers of the creator and the lookup table alone.
I’d hate to argue over definitions, but I’m interested in “Intelligence can be brute forced” and I wonder how common you think your usage is?
More things are intelligent than pass the Turing test (unless it is merely offered as a definition)
Yes, I am only considering the Turing test as a potential definition for intelligence, and I think this is obvious from the OP and all of my comments. See Chapter 7 of David Deutsch’s new book, The Beginnings of Infinity. Something arbitrarily slow can’t pass a Turing test that depends on real time interaction, so complexity theory allows us to treat a Turing test as a zero-knowledge proof that the agent who passes it possess something computationally more tractable than a lookup table. I also dismiss the lookup tables, but the reason why is that iterating conversation in a Turing test is Bayesian evidence that the agent interacting with me can’t be using an exponentially slow lookup table.
I agree with you that a major component of intelligence is how the knowledge is embedded in the program. If the knowledge is embedded solely by some external creator, then we don’t want to label that as intelligent. But how do we detect whether creator-embedded knowledge is a likely explanation? That has to do with the hardware it is implemented on. Since Watson is implemented on such massive resources, the explanation that it produces answers from searching a store of data has more likelihood. That is more plausible because of Watson’s hardware. If Watson achieved the same results with much less capable hardware, it would make the hypothesis that Watson’s responses are “merely pre-sorted embedded knowledge” less likely (assuming I knew no details of the software that Watson used, which is one of the conditions of a Turing test).
If you tell me something can converse with me, but that it takes 340 years to formulate a response to any sentence I utter, then I strongly suspect the implementation is arranged such that it is not intelligent. Similarly, if you tell me something can converse with me, and it only takes 1 second to respond reasonably, but it requires the resources of 10,000 humans and can’t produce responses of any demonstrably better quality than humans, then I also suspect it is just a souped-up version of a stupid algorithm, and thus not intelligent.
The behavior alone is not enough. I need details of how the behavior happens, and if I’m lacking detailed explanations of the software program, then details about the hardware resources it requires also tell me something.
If the laws of physics are very different than I think they are, one could fit a lookup table inside a human-sized body. That would not make it intelligent any more than expanding the size of a human brain would make it cease to be intelligent.
But it would mean that having a conversation with a person was not conclusive evidence that he or she wasn’t a lookup table implemented in a human substrate.
Would you say that neurosurgery is “teaching”, if one manipulates the brain’s bits such that the patient knows a new fact?
Yes, absolutely. “Regular” teaching is just exactly that, but achieved more slowly by communication over a noisy channel.
You’re assuming we’re at the fundamental limits of computing efficiency. If we are, power is essentially instructions per second. If not, it’s less useful than instructions per second. You might as well just say instructions per second and ignore power.
For what it’s worth, I’m not unimpressed because of the computing power used. I’m unimpressed because of the inflexibility of the program. If we built a true AI using the combined might of every computer on the planet, that would be impressive. Limiting computing power makes creating intelligence harder, but no matter how much you have, it’s far from easy. Chess can be brute forced, but intelligence can’t.
(I know Watson isn’t a chess program, and is far more impressive than one, but it’s still nothing compared to true AI.)
I disagree that intelligence can’t be brute forced, at least if you don’t care about computational resources. Presumably, what we mean by ‘intelligence’ is the passing of some Turing test (otherwise, if you just define ‘intelligence’ to be passing a Turing test with some kind of “elegance” in the design of the program, then your claim is true but only because you defined it to be that way).
If computational resources truly weren’t bounded, then we could build a massively inefficient lookup table whose search grows exponentially (or worse) in the length of the input. See this paper and this one for arguments about how to bound the complexity of such a lookup table argument. This paper is also very useful and the writing style is great.
What you cannot do, however, is claim that intelligence cannot be brute forced (again, under the assumption we ignore resources), without some appeal to computational complexity theory.
In particular, the Aaronson paper points out that according to Searle’s (flawed) Chinese room argument and Ned Block’s criticisms of the Turing test, complexity theory puts us in the situation where it is exactly the efficiency of an algorithm that gives it the property we ascribe to intelligence. We only know something’s intelligent because any reasonable Turing test that “respects” human intelligence will also function like a zero-knowledge proof that any agent who can pass the test does not have an algorithm that’s exponential in the size of the input.
Watson achieves the necessary speed (for the greatly restricted test of playing Jeopardy) but as you mentioned, Watson is easy to unmask simply by asking for the second or third best answers. However, in terms of complexity theory, Watson’s program fails the Turing test detrimentally… the program’s resource efficiency is dismal compared to humans. It’s doing something ‘stupid’ like a slow lookup with some correlations and statistical search. With similar resources to a human, this approach would be doomed to failure, so IBM just scaled up the resources until this bad approach no longer failed on the desired test cases.
Thus, if you would want to use ‘intelligence’ to label a planet sized computer which solves human Turing tests by brute forcing them with tremendously outrageous resource consumption, this would be a fundamental departure from what the literature I linked above considers ‘intelligence.’ If the planet-sized computer did fancy, efficient algorithms, then its massive resources would imply it can blow away human performance. The Turing test should be testing for the “general capacity” to do something, whether by lookup table or some equally stupid way, or by efficient intelligence.
Complexity theory really plays a large large role in all this. I would also add that I see no reason not to call a massive look-up table intelligent… assuming it is implemented in some kind of hardware and architecture that’s much better than anything human’s know about. If it turned out that human minds, for example, were some kind of quantum gravity look-up table (I absolutely do not believe this at all, but just for the sake of argument) I would not instantly believe that humans are not intelligent.
A planet-sized computer isn’t big enough to brute-force a Turing test. At least, it isn’t big enough to build a look-up table. Actually brute forcing a Turing test would require figuring out how the human would react to each possible output, in which case you’ve already solved AI.
If you had nigh infinite computing power you could create AIXI trivially. If you had quite a bit less, but still nigh infinite, computing power and programming time you could create a lookup table. If you had a planet-sized computer, you could probably create a virtual world in which intelligence evolves, though it would be far from trivial. Anything less than that, and it’s a nigh insurmountable task.
Increasing the computing power would make it easier, in that it wouldn’t make it harder, but within any reasonable bounds it’s not going to help much.
Why would the hardware matter?
Because regardless of software inefficiency, unless the hardware is able to produce solutions in real time, it can’t pass a Turing test. A massive look-up table would be just fine as an intelligence if it had the hardware throughput to do its exponential searches fast enough to answer in real time, the way a human does.
No, not even close. A planet sized computer is not even close to being up to that task, both the Parberry paper and Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument papers refute that quantitatively.
It depends on the Turing test. The Shieber paper shows that you are correct if the Turing test is “carry out a 5 minute long English conversation on unrestricted topics” but Watson says you’re wrong if the Turing test is “win at Jeopardy.” Both the test and the hardware matter.
Not true. It just requires coming up with an algorithmic shortcut that mimics a plausible human output. Just think of the Eliza chatbox that fooled people into believing it was a psychologist just by parroting their statements back as questions. Even after being told about it, many people refused to believe they had not just been talking to a psychologist … and yet, almost no one today would ascribe intelligence to Eliza.
A planet-sized computer doing dumb search in a lookup table built around some cute algorithmic tricks could mimic human output extremely well, especially in restricted domains. How would we unmask it as unintelligent? Suppose a company used it as a customer service chatbot for conversations never lasting more than 1 minute, and that its heuristics and massive search were adequate for coming up with appropriate replies to 99.999% of the conversations it would face of length up to 1 minute. As soon as you know the way its software works and that its ability is purely based on scaling up dumb software with lots of hardware, you’d declare it unintelligent. Prior to that, though, it would be indistinguishable from a human in 1 minute or less conversations.
Isn’t that like saying that air would be just fine as an intelligence, if you told a person the questions you were going to use during the Turing test and how much time you would take asking each one (and your hypothetical responses to their hypothetical responses, etc.) if only sound waves could be recorded and replayed at precisely the right time? Which they can be, though that is beside the point.
A look up table is functionally absolute evidence of intelligence without being at all intelligent just as air is for a Turing test between two humans.
I disagree. I think the section called “computation and waterfalls” in this paper makes a good case against this analogy.
I think my point was not clearly communicated, because that section is not relevant to this.
That section is about how just about any instance of a medium could be interpreted as just about any message by some possible minds. It picks an instance of a medium and fits a message and listener to the instance of a medium.
I am suggesting something much more normal: first you pick a particular listener (the normal practice in communication) and particular message, and I can manipulate the listener’s customary medium to give the particular listener the particular message. In this case, many different messages would be acceptable, so much the easier.
When administering a Turing test, why do you say it is the human on the other terminal that is intelligent, rather than their keyboard, or the administrator’s eyeballs? For the same reasons, a look up table is not intelligent.
First of all, the “systems reply” to Searle’s Chinese room argument is exactly the argument that the whole room, Searle plus the book plus the room itself, is intelligent and does understand Chinese, regardless of whether or not Searle does. Since such a situation has never occured with human-to-human interaction, it’s never been relevant for us to reconsider whether what we think is a human interacting with us really is intelligent. It’s easy to envision a future like Blade Runner where bots are successful enough that more sophisticated tests are needed to determine if something is intelligent. And this absolutely involves speed of the hardware.
Also, how do you know that a person isn’t a lookup table?
Would you say that neurosurgery is “teaching”, if one manipulates the brain’s bits such that the patient knows a new fact?
The probability is low that a person is a lookup table based on the rules of physics for which the probability is high. If someone is a lookup table controlled remotely from another universe with incomprehensibly more matter than ours, or similar...so what? That just means an intelligence arranged the lookup table and it did not arise by random, high-entropy coincidence, one can say this with probability as close to absolute as it gets. Whatever arranged the lookup table may have arisen by a random, high-entropy process, like evolution, but so what?
Something arbitrarily slow may still be intelligent, by any normal meaning. More things are intelligent than pass the Turing test (unless it is merely offered as a definition) just as more things fly than are birds.
If the laws of physics are very different than I think they are, one could fit a lookup table inside a human-sized body. That would not make it intelligent any more than expanding the size of a human brain would make it cease to be intelligent. That wouldn’t prevent a robot from operating analogously to a human other than being on a different substrate, either.
What do you mean when you say “intelligence”? If you mean something performing the same functions as what we agree is intelligence given a contrived enough situation, I agree a lookup table could perform that function.
The problem with what I think is your definition isn’t the physical impossibility of creating the lookup table, but that once the informational output to an input is informationally as complex as it will ever be, anything transformation happening afterwards isn’t reasonably intelligence. The whole system of the lookup table’s creator and the lookup table may perhaps be described as an intelligent system, but not the fingers of the creator and the lookup table alone.
I’d hate to argue over definitions, but I’m interested in “Intelligence can be brute forced” and I wonder how common you think your usage is?
Yes, I am only considering the Turing test as a potential definition for intelligence, and I think this is obvious from the OP and all of my comments. See Chapter 7 of David Deutsch’s new book, The Beginnings of Infinity. Something arbitrarily slow can’t pass a Turing test that depends on real time interaction, so complexity theory allows us to treat a Turing test as a zero-knowledge proof that the agent who passes it possess something computationally more tractable than a lookup table. I also dismiss the lookup tables, but the reason why is that iterating conversation in a Turing test is Bayesian evidence that the agent interacting with me can’t be using an exponentially slow lookup table.
I agree with you that a major component of intelligence is how the knowledge is embedded in the program. If the knowledge is embedded solely by some external creator, then we don’t want to label that as intelligent. But how do we detect whether creator-embedded knowledge is a likely explanation? That has to do with the hardware it is implemented on. Since Watson is implemented on such massive resources, the explanation that it produces answers from searching a store of data has more likelihood. That is more plausible because of Watson’s hardware. If Watson achieved the same results with much less capable hardware, it would make the hypothesis that Watson’s responses are “merely pre-sorted embedded knowledge” less likely (assuming I knew no details of the software that Watson used, which is one of the conditions of a Turing test).
If you tell me something can converse with me, but that it takes 340 years to formulate a response to any sentence I utter, then I strongly suspect the implementation is arranged such that it is not intelligent. Similarly, if you tell me something can converse with me, and it only takes 1 second to respond reasonably, but it requires the resources of 10,000 humans and can’t produce responses of any demonstrably better quality than humans, then I also suspect it is just a souped-up version of a stupid algorithm, and thus not intelligent.
The behavior alone is not enough. I need details of how the behavior happens, and if I’m lacking detailed explanations of the software program, then details about the hardware resources it requires also tell me something.
But it would mean that having a conversation with a person was not conclusive evidence that he or she wasn’t a lookup table implemented in a human substrate.
Yes, absolutely. “Regular” teaching is just exactly that, but achieved more slowly by communication over a noisy channel.