Re:Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped
by joe_the_user on Sunday December 15, 2019 @04:01AM
(#21795226)
It's certainly worth keeping in mind the limitations that you describe and human's learning activity is certainly not as the rationalist intuition. But to take these limitation as entirely characterizing human activity seems bend the stick too far the other way and fly in the face of the many ways humans have modified their environment and adapted to those modifications and fairly often learned with only a few examples. And sure, plausibly a fair portion of those quick adaptation involve reworking basic facilities like vision. The whole thing is consistent with the neocortex sitting on top of the rest of brain and serving as a means to rewire it.
Or, when we see “one” example of a new animal (for example), do we see a single picture? Or do we see it moving for about a second? Effectively multiple images? And, having previously learned a general model for physics, stereoscopic vision, and lighting, does that one second of motion gives us the size, shape, and a guess at the musculature of the animal?
If you strip those advantages, how many training examples do we need? The examples of people blind from birth or from extreme youth who regain vision in adulthood[0] implies that we learn a lot in our youth about how to see, which we can share between recognition tasks we learn later. Keeping those basic skills — avoiding “catastrophic forgetting” — still seems to be a rare and advanced feature in AI, but it’s not impossible.
There is still a lot we don’t know about how our own minds work. We might be closer than we realise, or much further.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_May_(skier) amongst others. I never did find the name of the guy who learned to see from touching a monkey statue…