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A comment on Why Self-Taught Artificial Intelligence Has Trouble with the Real World. Parent comment

Re:Why Self-Taught Artificial Intelligence Has Trouble with ... by chongli on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @01:21PM (#16431605)
The universe does follow an algorithm. It just involves orders of magnitude more data than computers (or humans) can deal with. So our brains don't try to contend with that data. We generalize, we use heuristics, we make ad hoc rules all the time and throw them away when they're contradicted. We're susceptible to all sorts of illusions and cognitive biases but we'd be even worse off if we tried to calculate exact answers before doing anything.

We'd end up doing nothing at all.

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Re:Why Self-Taught Artificial Intelligence Has Trouble with ... by dmreedy on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @01:31PM (#16431704)
I was prodding at what I perceived as dualism above; was curious how deep it ran.

However, to your point, I'm willing to bet that our need to use heuristics and approximations has more to do with the mathematical inability to reverse-engineer chaotic systems than anything. It's not so much that we just don't have the time to build a more complete picture. It's that it's actually impossible to do so.

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Re:Why Self-Taught Artificial Intelligence Has Trouble with ... by seiferteric on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @06:38PM (#16433952)
I took his statement more like the difference between building an airplane vs building a bird. Both fly, but in totally different ways and with different strengths and weaknesses. We can build an airplane and fly across the world in a day, but we are completely unable to build a bird because the level of complexity is much much higher.
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Re:Why Self-Taught Artificial Intelligence Has Trouble with ... by e_b on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @09:49PM (#16434801)
The universe does not follow an algorithm.
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Re:Why Self-Taught Artificial Intelligence Has Trouble with ... by IntronExon on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @01:27PM (#16431661)
The universe may include random, or changing elements, we truly don’t know yet. At any given moment, Maxwell’s Demon might be able to describe a complete wavefunction which amounts to “the observable universe,” but we don’t really know if the evolution of the wavefunction would be deterministic.

Mind you, the universe could be infinite as well, which would throw a bit of a wrench into it. All of which is to say that there may not be an algorithm the universe follows, even in principle.

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