News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Agent57: Outperforming the human Atari benchmark by gnramires on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @10:58AM (#22738126)
You can make a simple theory of anything. An airplane as a spherical ball of varying friction with a steerable propulsion. Or a massive electro-mechanical system. There's a fidelity curve as you progress in complexity. Fidelity curve of a literal ball stabilizes quickly, while the fidelity curve of an airplane extends far.

The brain is massively complex, we still don't understand the ways that it computes and learns in detail except generalities such as using electrical and chemical signals, neurotransmissors, and some knowledge of architecture and region differentiation.

Those models all point to an extremely complex system with quite a number of different specialized parts, with neurons individually having quite amazing complexity (and so on for capsules, neuronal systems).

I think it's unlikely a "simple" system (if you could consider a vanilla CNN simple, for example) will solve human-like AGI efficiently (either data-efficiently or computationally efficiently). There are too many requirements.

Also, while simplicity is good... a researcher shouldn't be caught obsessing over it exclusively, as it is not the end goal, which personally would be the advancement of understanding and of our capabilities instead.

Re:Agent57: Outperforming the human Atari benchmark by eli_gottlieb on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @11:37AM (#22738555)
>The brain is massively complex, we still don't understand the ways that it computes and learns in detail except generalities such as using electrical and chemical signals, neurotransmissors, and some knowledge of architecture and region differentiation.

Again, not really. Broadly speaking, the AI community is pretty far behind the neuroscience community in terms of understanding the basic principles underlying how brains work. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/principles-neural-design

Re:Agent57: Outperforming the human Atari benchmark by Retric on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @02:39PM (#22740907)
The human brian is encoded via surprisingly limited amounts of information in DNA. It’s therefore more elegant than many modern AI systems.

The often quoted 6×10^9 base pairs overstates the complexity as a lot of non coding DNA exists, and much of what’s left is redundant or does not relate to the brain.

PS: We actually know quite about about how the brain learns and computes information. The are really interesting information about how the optic nerve encodes information for example.

Re:Agent57: Outperforming the human Atari benchmark by fg6hr on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @11:15PM (#22745266)
DNA by itself doesn't produce a human or a cell. You need another functional cell or human to create a replica. I would compare DNA with instructions to create a new car: the instructions are incomplete and assume the existence of a car factory. DNA tells "now paint the car with of these colors", but it doesn't tell how.
Re:Agent57: Outperforming the human Atari benchmark by Retric on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @12:40AM (#22745746)
Computer programs don’t include the CPU design. DNA on the other hand encodes everything which then gets leveraged during cell division.

Basically, DNA includes the design for both the car, car factory, and all the component factories that feed the car factory, and the mines that feed the component factories. People have dependencies on their diet for things like vitamin C, but that’s a whole other issue.

PS: Mitochondria also have DNA, but that’s just location specific and can simply be added to the total for the cell.

Re:Agent57: Outperforming the human Atari benchmark by fg6hr on Thursday April 02, 2020 @03:00AM (#22756841)
Why do you think DNA includes everything?
Re:Agent57: Outperforming the human Atari benchmark by Retric on Thursday April 02, 2020 @05:55PM (#22764312)
Mitosis and RNA.
Re:Agent57: Outperforming the human Atari benchmark by visarga on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @05:24PM (#22742773)
> The human brian is encoded via surprisingly limited amounts of information in DNA.

Same DNA that is referred to in other discussions as 'the ultimate spaghetti code'.