{"id":2749,"date":"2015-01-12T20:25:59","date_gmt":"2015-01-13T03:25:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/?p=2749"},"modified":"2015-01-13T19:33:41","modified_gmt":"2015-01-14T02:33:41","slug":"on-computers-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2015\/01\/12\/on-computers-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"On Computers \u2018Learning\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href='http:\/\/wmbriggs.com\/blog\/?p=15223'>Briggs<\/a> is certainly right that much of what is touted as &#8216;Artificial Intelligence&#8217; is just the use of electronic machinery to implement the calculations in a method devised by human intelligence. Indeed, for now that really is all that computers can do. But it already goes far beyond playing optimally at tic-tac-toe (trivial) , or chess, or simple kinds of poker. Those are what attract popular attention, but they imply far less for the future than do even the earliest attempts at voice and image recognition.\/p><\/p>\n<p>A true &#8220;learning&#8221; program isn&#8217;t just the implementation of a previously worked out method of solution to a particular problem, but takes as its input the results of its various earlier responses to similar problems and from that constructs a better solution algorithm than the one it had before[*]. This can be done deterministically by a machine, and perhaps it is only hubris that convinces some of us that what we do is qualitatively different from that.<\/p>\n<p>So I think Briggs&#8217; commenter Larry Geiger nailed it with \u201cThe extrapolation from what computers can do to what some people *think* that they can do is foolishness\u201d(emphasis added).<\/p>\n[*]Update(2015-01-13) &#8211; like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2015\/01\/jeremy-howard-the-wonderful-and-terrifying-implications-of-computers-that-can-learn.html\">this<\/a> which coincidentally came to my attention on the morning after I wrote the above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Briggs is certainly right that much of what is touted as &#8216;Artificial Intelligence&#8217; is just the use of electronic machinery to implement the calculations in a method devised by human intelligence. Indeed, for now that really is all that computers &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2015\/01\/12\/on-computers-learning\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2749"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2754,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2749\/revisions\/2754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}