Re: [computer-go] Re: What is thought

["Robin Kramer" <robin@xxxxxxxx>]

Eric,

> Chrilly,
>
> With all due respect, you ought to look at *What is Thought?* before
> flaming it.
>
> Chrilly> There is a constant in thought-explanation since the
> Chrilly> Greek-time. Thought/the human mind is always explained in the
> Chrilly> latest technology...  Now the explanation
> Chrilly> is DNA, because this is the latest new technology.

You should think about the purpose of a list serve.  Many people have the
idea that a list serve is a place to broad cast their ideas to the world,
when in reality list serves are an opportunity to have two way
communication.  Maybe Chrilly thought that you were trying to start a
meaningful conversation.

Before you respond, read

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

Sincerely,

Robin Kramer

P.S. Occam's Razor, is the idea that if your data does not fit your
theory, you should get a new theory.  "Explanations should not be 
multiplied beyound necessity!" is a translation from latin.  When Gallaleo
discovered mountains on the moon with his tellescope, the church
theorists, said that, "it is not possible, because we know that all
heavenly bodies are spheres", they then concluded that there must be a
perfectly clear thin solid on top of the mountains.  Gallaleo then said,
"On top of the clear solid which is a sphere, there are clear mountains."

>
>
> I set out to explain how the mind is equivalent to execution of a
> computer program, which was more or less proved by Turing.
> But Turing's result is mysterious, because how can execution of a
> computer program have meaning? How can it be conscious? How can it
> understand? *What is Thought?* gives a theory explaining this through an
> extrapolation of 20 years of computer science research into Occam's
> razor. Basically the point is that if a compact enough program is
> evolved that behaves powerfully enough, this implies the world has
> understandable structure and the program understands it.
>
> Now I did not expect this to be in the DNA, that was forced by the data.
> I give arguments from complexity theory, developmental biology,
> evolutionary programming, ethology, psychophysics, simple inspection,
> linguistics, and other areas why this is so. The model gives a lot of
> insight, agrees with vast amounts of data, and makes falsifiable
> predictions.
>
> Chrilly> In his book "Behind Deep Blue" Feng Hsu´s opinion of
> Chrilly> AI is quite clear: "Bullshit".
>
> *What is Thought?* discusses computer science approaches (like Deep
> Blue) as well as AI approaches (more or less attempting to emulate
> humans). CS approaches can exploit underlying structure and be
> effective in some domains, more effective than humans. By using
> evaluation functions and alpha-beta, Deep Blue exploits structure
> in chess quite effectively. PARADISE, an AI chess program also
> discussed, is far less effective, although very interesting in other
> ways.
> However as discussed, CS approaches won't
> work for Go, and AI approaches won't understand either.
>
> One reason AI approaches have trouble is that they are hand coded.
> Finding a program that exploits structure is an NP-hard problem, and
> humans are no more capable of solving it than they are of solving
> hard travelling salesman problems. The only hope, I suspect is
> some form of evolutionary computing, and *What is Thought?* describes
> new techniques for evolutionary computing that have been remarkably
> effective at exploiting structure in some hard domains, although
> I make no guarantee they will work for Go with current computational
> resources.
>
> Go has an enormous amount of underlying structure. It is basically
> defined by 9 rules on an n by n board. If a Go program does not
> exploit the underlying structure, it does not understand, and
> will not play effective Go. People exploit the underlying structure by
> building programs on top of modules coded into our DNA.
>
> *What is Thought?* will not tell you how to solve Go. If I knew
> that, I would have solved it myself. I've worked on the problem.
> But I believe *What is Thought?* will give you a lot of insight
> into the nature of the problem, the nature of understanding,
> the nature of human reasoning abilities and how they differ
> from computer science approaches, as well as describing
> important techniques in evolutionary
> programming, and addressing mind more generally.
>
> Also, it gives a pedagogical review of many fundamental concepts
> in computer science and computer game playing.
>
> Later today or tomorrow the web cite www.whatisthought.com should
> be up, with more information on the book, my previous publications in
> game playing, and other information.
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