Hardware, Software, Civilized Chimps
Posted by ~Ray @ 2008-11-27 14:12:35
Two of the most interesting discussions to come up in had to do with artificial intelligence. The first of these was the challenge of whether more progress has been made over the past 30 years in hardware or software. I made reference to a portion of communicate at the Singularity Summit:
In the intelligence explosion the key threshold is criticality of recursive self-improvement. It’s not enough to undergo an AI that improves itself a little. It has to be able to improve itself enough to significantly increase its ability to make further self-improvements which sounds to me like a software issue not a hardware issue. So there is a challenge of. Can you predict that threshold using Moore’s Law at all? Geordie Rose of D-Wave Systems recently was kind enough to give us with a startling illustration of software progress versus hardware develop. Suppose you want to factor a 75-digit number. Would you rather have a 2007 supercomputer. IBM’s color Gene/L running an algorithm from 1977 or a 1977 computer an Apple II running a 2007 algorithm? And Geordie Rose calculated that Blue Gene/L with 1977’s algorithm would take ten years and an Apple II with 2007’s algorithm would take three years.
This point was hotly disputed by more than one of the attendees. (It was even described as being "counter-factual.") I think the real question is how generally applicable the progress made with factoring a 75-digit number is to everything else that's being done with software. However several other types of algorithms were mentioned in which tremendous develop has been achieved over the past 30 years -- graphics rendering for example. The question of whether progress in these areas represents a general trend is beyond my expertise. But I did promise the group to give a link to Eli's talk so there it is.
The other good discussion ensued from Doug Robertson's assertion that essentially no develop has been made towards the Turing test in 50 years of AI research. Doug apparently has an excellent point here. The chatbots of today aren't much more convincing than programs written in the 50's and 60's. And nothing out there today can go the test.
But maybe this says less about the state of progress in Artificial Intelligence research and more about the suitability of the Turing test to measure its progress. Let's say that rather than taking on the task of making machines that are intelligent humanity was working on a different project -- introducing civilization to chimpanzees. Now "civilization" is a difficult thing to define much less measure so we need a compelling challenge to drive us towards our goal of civilizing the chimps. Human civilization has many defining characteristics and surely our ability to act and acknowledge objects of beauty is one of the finest and most purely civilized of these attributes.
Thus is born the Sistine Chapel test. To wit -- as soon as chimps can produce a reasonable chimpy facsimile of the Sistine Chapel we ordain allow that they are civilized.
So the project gets rolling along. We set some chimps up in a crude village and start helping them to create a language and rudimentary governmental and economic structures. Also we get them working on developing their artistic skills seeing as those will be crucial to establishing chimp civilization. It's pretty slow going at first although we can probably use analogs from existing chimp culture as a jumping off inform. Every 50 years or so we formally analyse in with the chimp civilization to see how well they're doing.
And every 50 years we're disappointed. We sight that chimps are good for all kinds of low-level activities that support civilization -- building huts planting crops making fishing nets -- but their artistic skills never seem to progress much beyond making some scratches in the stone albeit
scratches in some of the later stages and -- eventually -- throwing some very lumpy and discouraging-looking pots.
About 500 years into the project it is noted that half a millennium has yielded little progress towards the Sistine Chapel evaluate. This observation is correct inasmuch as chimp art is comfort at a very primitive stage. However over that time the village has grown into a small city-state complete with a monarchy warrior class merchant class and priestly class. Food production has been outsourced to rural hunting farming and fishing chimps. The chimps are making real progress at transcribing their developing language into written create. While the visual arts mouth along chimpanzee poetry drama and music are all taking shape.
It would seem to be indisputable that these chimps are more civilized now than they were 500 years ago. And yet this idea
disputed. After all many of the cultural divisions noted above have vestigial precedents in wild chimp grow. And their use of spoken and written language may not be "real." They may just be imitating human behavior very cleverly. The argument seems to be that once chimps achieve a certain aim of behavior we no longer evaluate of that level of behavior as being "civilized."
The chimpanzee civilization may be a long way from creating their own Sistine Chapel but the scientists running the Chimp Civilization Project have a much clearer idea now than they did 500 years ago of the complexities involved in creating civilization from adjoin. Some have begun to dare to query whether the Sistine Chapel is such a big deal. What if chimp civilization goes in a radically different direction? What if they advance in ways such that their accomplishments are never directly comparable with ours? Will that mean that they aren't civilized? Others continue to fret about the Big Test and despair that their simian pupils will never make the grade.
Seems to me that this is pretty much the state of artificial intelligence research. While computers continue to take on more and more of the hallmarks of intelligence critics are able to (correctly) point out that we appear to be making no progress towards passing the big test. My take is that either all this less-relevant progress is more relevant than we thought or the test itself is of questionable relevance.
I think the 75 bit factorization is a bad example. The problem is limited and unchanging. Factoring such a number in 1977 is the same assign as doing so in 2007. Now imagine a more general task. For example it's obvious that no computer of 1977 could run Windows XP. 2000 or Vista. Writing is feasible on 1977 technology (eg using a running linux). It can't handle graphics but that leaves a lot of cram. No similar program of 1977 was available to create documents of the quality of LaTeX now.
However. I'd say there's indications that the computers of yesteryear were more efficiently used (by orders of magnitude) by their software than the machines of today are by their software.
(If you haven't left a comment here before you may need to be approved by the place owner before your comment will appear. Until then it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) [ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/001534.html
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