Re: Guessing?

On Jul 13, 9:07 am, JOG <j..._at_cs.nott.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> >> The greatest weakness in the entire debate, however,
> >> is the capacity issue. Lack of computing capacity is
> >> a complete explanation for what computers can't do (yet.)
>
> <splutter/>
>
> Ok, this one is just ridiculous. Lets take the bastion of good old
> fashioned AI - chess. In the 90's the chess AI "deep blue" was
> processing over 200 million board positions a second. That's right.
> 200 millions every single second. Let's compare that to a grand
> master, who can examine about 8. Yup, that's 199,999,992 less
> positions per second than the AI.

Hey! You've been complaining about the other side's simplistic analyses, but here you're doing exactly the same thing. Deep Blue included special purpose hardware for playing chess, as well as dozens of general purpose CPUs. And you're claiming it's looking at 25 million times as many positions per second. Yet, Deep Blue lost to Kasparov, and Deeper Blue only just managed to eke out a victory. So, the 25 million number is crap, isn't it? It appears the human and the machine are roughly at parity, in terms of chess playing ability. And Kasparov is a general-purpose machine, capable of doing things that Deep Blue can't, like ride a bike.

One lone human has *way* more processing power than today's computers. This is a sufficient explanation of their difference in cognitive ability.

Marshall Received on Mon Jul 14 2008 - 18:45:47 CEST