02-24-2015 | Mechanical Cognition II

"Think" and "intelligence" are both what Marvin Minsky has called suitcase words. They are words into which we pack many meanings so that we can talk about complex issues in a shorthand way. When we look inside these words we find many different aspects, mechanisms, and levels of understanding. This makes answering the perennial questions of "can machines think?" or "when will machines reach human level intelligence?" fraught with danger. The suitcase words are used to cover both specific performance demonstrations by machines and more general competence that humans might have. People are getting confused and generalizing from performance to competence and grossly overestimating the real capabilities of machines today and in the next few decades.

In 1997 a super computer beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a tournament. Today there are dozens of programs that run on laptop computers and have higher chess rankings than those ever achieved by humans. Computers can definitely perform better than humans at playing chess. But they have nowhere near human level competence at chess.

All chess playing programs use Turing's brute force tree search method with heuristic evaluation. Computers were fast enough by the seventies that this approach overwhelmed other AI programs that tried to play chess with processes that emulated how people reported that they thought about their next move, and so those approaches were largely abandoned.

Today's chess programs have no way of saying why a particular move is "better" than another move, save that it moves the game to a part of a tree where the opponent has less good options. A human player can make generalizations and describe why certain types of moves are good, and use that to teach a human player. Brute force programs cannot teach a human player, except by being a sparing partner. It is up to the human to make the inferences, the analogies, and to do any learning on their own. The chess program doesn't know that it is outsmarting the person, doesn't know that it is a teaching aid, doesn't know that it is playing something called chess nor even what "playing" is. Making brute force chess playing perform better than any human gets us no closer to competence in chess.

-- Rodney A. Brooks - click to read the rest, it's quite superb.