At Least One Point Handicapped.

Earlier this week Omaha had some Democrat thingy to attend. It was being held at Shari's, a Denny's clone the kids like because the coloring pads "are better," according to both. The girls immediately started doing the various word puzzles on the page labeled "Brainy Circus". And one of the problems on the page was "Can you make ten different words out of the phrase 'Brainy Circus'?" Well, while the girls worked on it, I did too, in the notebook I habitually carry with me. I got up to somewhere in the low-80s on my own before considering turning it over to a computer, but I realized that there were probably a few words I knew that I wouldn't have clued the girls into, like anus or urinary.

Curious, I wrote a quickie Python program (Python being "Perl for grownups") and compared the phrase against my spelling dictionary to discover 339 hits; I then ran the results file against my definitions dictionary and that pared it down to 168. I'm pleased to admit that I got "incubus," but somehow missed "binary" as a respelling of "brainy".

I'm such a geek...

A failed argument.

Mark Helpren criticizes those who argue that the Chinese Room as a "system that understands Chinese even if no one component does" fails to help AI enthusiasts because, as he puts it:

No one, after all, will be impressed by being assured that even if no part of an "intelligent machine" really understands what it is doing, the complete system, which includes every logician and mathematician as far back as the Babylonians, does understand.

Yet I fail to see why this is problematic. Why does Helpren believe this statement is compelling, when it can equally be argued

No one, after all, will be impressed by being assured that even if no part of the human brain really understands what it is doing, the complete system, which includes every neuron, does understand.

Helpren is still wedded to a ghost-in-the-machine view of human intelligence when he writes, "[A computer's] apparent intelligent activity is simply an illusion suffered by those who do not fully appreciate the way in which algorithms capture and preserve not intelligence itself but the fruits of intelligence." But the same could be said of the human brain: seemingly intelligent activity by a human being is not evidence of intelligence, but evidence of the evolutionary processes have captured some survival-worthy activity and encapsulated it as a collection of reponses to stimuli. The difference between human intelligence and computer intelligence is simply one of subtlety, and we should not be smug in our armchairs that robots will never catch up.

Musings on the end of an era...

( Dirty, nasty, sexist pig writing. Because you always knew I had it in me. )