News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why Watson and Siri Are Not Real AI. Parent comment

Re:Why Watson and Siri Are Not Real AI by simonh on Tuesday February 11, 2014 @06:57AM (#7217151)
Did the algorithm decide what the characteristics of an interesting game are, or were they hard-coded? Could is analyze the interestingness of games generally? Could it analyze why some people like some games and other people don't?

If it couldn't do these things, then it was in no way intelligent, because it was not analyzing at a conceptual level. Programs that simply optimize data towards a set of target characteristics are clever, but not intelligent. Hofstadter goes into this in the article.

You're making exactly the same mistake those over-optimistic AI researchers made back in the 60s. They created some whiz-bang optimisation algorithms and thought general purpose AI must be just around the corner, but it turns out that actual conceptual analysis and reasoning is a completely different and fundamentally unrelated problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Watson and Siri Are Not Real AI by Houshalter on Tuesday February 11, 2014 @09:01AM (#7217611)
That's an arbitrary distinction. The goal might have been decided by human programmers, that doesn't mean the process isn't itself intelligent. You are right it is using a crude optimization process that is a lot weaker than human intelligence, but it's still "intelligent".
[ Parent | on HN ]