Artificial intelligence: Computers do not think, they "shuffle bits"

In response to an item I wrote on whether computers really think, friend Gil Dodgen, author of the highly acclaimed computer program, World Championship Checkers (pictured above), writes to say,

As you know, I've been involved in AI programming for many years.

One of my greatest joys was meeting, knowing, and challenging Marion Tinsley to games of checkers with my computer program. See here:

I could tell you many amazing stories about Tinsley. He was a true genius and prodigy, and a devout born-again Christian. He had a major influence on me, and I had the opportunity to share with him, just shortly before he died, my conversion from atheism to Christianity.

I once told Marion that my computer program doesn't even know it's playing checkers; it just shuffles bits. I mentioned this comment to my programming colleague Ed (with whom I computed the only perfect-play endgame databases for the game of checkers, corrected Jonathan Schaeffer's win-loss-draw databases, and developed a chess-variant program called Gothic Vortex), and Ed dubbed me The Master Bit-Shuffler.

And that's all computer programs do: shuffle bits. This has nothing whatsoever to do with real intelligence or creativity.

That said, a book, One Jump Ahead, has been written about Tinsley's legacy.

And Gil, of all people should know about real intelligence and creativity. He is also a superb piano player, as this will demonstrate.

See also:

Artificial intelligence: Getting computers to pretend to converse is an " extremely hard computational problem"

Conversing with computers, or with their programmers?

Computers: Most engineers must have guessed that they are not robots

Artificial intelligence: A look at things that neither we nor computers can discover

Can a conscious mind be built out of software?

Also: Mind vs. meat vs. computers - the differences Let the machine read your mind (We offer an installment plan!) Mind-computer blend: Who believes in this? Artificial intelligence: Making the whole universe intelligent? Brain cells release information more widely than previously thought.

Artificial intelligence: Getting computers to pretend to converse is an "extremely hard computational problem"

A computer engineer of some importance has written to say that he thinks me a bit off the mark here, where I deny that computers actually think. He writes,

modern computers are often programmed to be adaptive, in that rules are given for learning (e.g, generalizing or updating "beliefs") based on experience. So in fact computers can be (and are) programmed to "learn" things that their programmers don't know.

He argues that behaviorally, this is thinking, but that it does not include consciousness (which means, I suppose, that he disagrees with Kevin Warwick).

He does, however, say,

And the important part that you and I apparently agree on is that there is no compelling reason to believe that a computer program is doing something altogether like what a human being does.

Now, there, he must certainly be right. In the original post, I had discussed a problem I was having with a computer-based book order system that did not allow me to buy ten copies of a book (because no one had thought to program in the possibility of multiple orders).

The stupidest human clerk would have understood immediately.

He is really annoyed with my saying that

Most people will believe that the computer is human if it just sounds wittier or sexier than they do. In fact, the only reason this isn't yesterday's news is that so many computer nerds are inarticulate, and wouldn't have any idea what to program the computer to say.

He calls that "gratuitous" and "wrong!".

Hey, I only said that to see who I would get a rise out of. Turned out to be him, imagine!

Anyway, he advises me that making computers respond convincingly to unscripted dialogue (natural language processing) is "an extremely hard computational problem."

But I am hardly surprised. Dialogue is fiendishly difficult to write well, as my novelist friends aver. It is one reason why I went into non-fiction rather than fiction.

Artificial intelligence: Conversing with computers? ... or with their programmers?

One reason the artificial intelligence fantasy ("Soon computers will think and feel just like people!") has enjoyed such a long shelf life is a fundamental misunderstanding: The computer is thinking.

Actually, the computer is not thinking. A programmer has developed a series of responses to our inputs. To the extent that the programmer can guess what we need, things will work. One way of seeing this is "thought, in the past tense."

Just yesterday, for example, I was trying to order ten copies of a book from an automated book ordering site. But the programmer apparently forgot to build in the option of ordering ten copies at once. Needless to say, I was hardly going to order one copy ten times. But it's no use trying to talk to the computer. I e-mailed the office and asked to have someone phone me. That's what I mean by "thought, in the past tense." If the programmer didn't think of it, the computer won't either.

Now, fast forward to the Turing test (can a machine fool you into believing it is a person?), which is once again being tested. David Smith, the Observer's technology correspondent reports:

Can machines think? That was the question posed by the great mathematician Alan Turing. Half a century later six computers are about to converse with human interrogators in an experiment that will attempt to prove that the answer is yes.

In the 'Turing test" a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer's responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be 'thinking'. ("'Intelligent' computers put to the test. Programmers try to fool human interrogators," October 5, 2008)

October 12, the designers of six computer programs are competing for the Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence - an 18-carat gold medal and $100,000. Volunteers will sit at a computer, half of whose split screen is operated by another human and half by a program. After five minutes of text-based talk, they must guess. If 30% are unsure, then the computer is said to be "thinking."

I've always felt there was something pretty fishy about this "Turing test", and I agree with philosopher A.C. Grayling who points out,

'The test is misguided. Everyone thinks it's you pitting yourself against a computer and a human, but it's you pitting yourself against a computer and computer programmer. AI is an exciting subject, but the Turing test is pretty crude.'

(Note: I think Grayling means here that you are pitting yourself against a human who is a computer programmer who has coded responses to possible questions and a human who is not a programmer and is simply generating the responses in real time.)

I have no doubt that a programmer with Oscar Wilde's dialogue skills could program a computer as a clever conversation partner. Most people will believe that the computer is human if it just sounds wittier or sexier than they do. In fact, the only reason this isn't yesterday's news is that so many computer nerds are inarticulate, and wouldn't have any idea what to program the computer to say.

My level of confidence in the Turing test did not improve when I read cyberneticist Kevin Warwick's explanation that machines are in factc onscious:

I would say now that machines are conscious, but in a machine-like way, just as you see a bat or a rat is conscious like a bat or rat, which is different from a human. I think the reason Alan Turing set this game up was that maybe to him consciousness was not that important; it's more the appearance of it, and this test is an important aspect of appearance.

Professor Warwick, did you get the memo on the "hard problem of consciousness"?

It really is a hard problem. They're not just making that up to get research funding.

See also:

Computers: Most engineers must have guessed that they are not robots

Artificial intelligence: A look at things that neither we nor computers can discover

Can a conscious mind be built out of software?

Also: Mind vs. meat vs. computers - the differences Let the machine read your mind (We offer an installment plan!) Mind-computer blend: Who believes in this? Artificial intelligence: Making the whole universe intelligent? Brain cells release information more widely than previously thought.

Artificial intelligence: A look at things that neither we nor computers can discover

Recently (April 15, 2008), Robert J. Marks II, Distinguished Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Baylor University in Texas, addressed a joint meeting of the local American Scientific Affiliation and the Baylor Society for Conversations in Religion, Ethics and Science, on the limitations of computer models of life and mind:

Computing has no theory of everything (T.O.E.). We're uncertain whether physics has a T.O.E. as revealed in M-theory but, due to the genius of Kurt Godel 75 years ago, smart people like Stephen Hawking are starting to doubt it.

This is because of a new startling mathematical idea from algorithmic information theory (AIT): There exist things that are true that cannot be derived from fundamental principles. Some things are true simply because they are true.

Many claim God cannot be proved. (Although I'll show you Godel's short mathematical proof of God's existence). There are some things we know exist that we can prove we will never know.

Most doubt a computer program will ever write a deeply meaningful poem or a classic novel. How about something simpler? Can we look at an arbitrary computer program and decide whether or not it will ever print out the number 3?

We can for some programs. But Alan Turing, the founder of computer science, proved it is impossible to write a program to analyze another arbitrary program to tell us whether or not a 3 will be printed.

In fact, we can't write a computer program to determine anything another arbitrary computer program will do. (This is called Rice's theorem.) To find out, we need to run the program.

We can also prove there are numbers of finite precision numbers a computer can't compute. One of these is Chaitin's number, an astonishing constant between zero and one we know exists.

If we knew Chaitin's constant to finite precision - one single number - we could solve many open problems in mathematics. These include the Riemann hypothesis, Goldbach's conjecture and whether or not there is an odd perfect number.

Chaitin's constant exists, but we can prove we will never know it. These and other mind bending properties in the field of AIT [artificial intelligence theory] seem too far fetched to be true, but with a minimum of math, I will convince you otherwise.

Sounds interesting. I have written to ask him how it turned out.

By the way here are some other Mindful Hack stories on how the human brain differs from a computer:

Mind vs. meat vs. computers - the differences

Let the machine read your mind (We offer an installment plan!)

Free will: In fruit flies yet?

Emotion machines - so that's what we are! (?)

Mind-computer blend: Who believes in this?

Artificial intelligence: Making the whole universe intelligent?

Brain cells release information more widely than previously thought.

Can a conscious mind be built out of software?

David Gelernter drives yet another stake through the idea of "artificial intelligence":

believe it is hugely unlikely, though not impossible, that a conscious mind will ever be built out of software. Even if it could be, the result (I will argue) would be fairly useless in itself. But an unconscious simulated intelligence certainly could be built out of software--and might be useful. Unfortunately, AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind are nowhere near knowing how to build one. They are missing the most important fact about thought: the "cognitive continuum" that connects the seemingly unconnected puzzle pieces of thinking (for example analytical thought, common sense, analogical thought, free association, creativity, hallucination). The cognitive continuum explains how all these reflect different values of one quantity or parameter that I will call "mental focus" or "concentration"-which changes over the course of a day and a lifetime.

Hat tip to David Warren. We make a similar point in The Spiritual Brain.

Science journalist notices that people are smarter than apes

I was, so to speak, "shocked" to read this story from Reuters:

Shock: kids smarter than chimps
by Will Dunham
September 07, 2007 09:22am
Article from: Reuters

IN another case of researchers reporting the bleeding obvious, European scientists have found that children are smarter than chimpanzees.

A unique study comparing the abilities of human toddlers to chimpanzees and orang-utans found that two-year-old children have social learning skills superior to the apes, the researchers said.
In one social learning test, a researcher showed the children and apes how to pop open a plastic tube to get food or a toy contained inside. The children observed and imitated the solution.

The apes, of course, tried to smash their way in.

I think I LIKE Will Dunham. He admits stuff that is true.

Free will and neuroscience: More on the flies that think

Recently, I reported on an experiement with fruit flies that showed that the flies are not robotic, but can engage in spontaneous behavior.

In a recent Daily Telegraph article, Roger Highfield explains:

"The point here is that the people claiming that free will doesn't exist say that one day we will be able to show exactly why a murderer must necessarily have acted the way he did by looking closely at his brain. We can show that you cannot even do this in fly brains, as a matter of principle."

That's the key, of course. It is a matter of principle (actually, fact) that flies do not behave like robots.
Also,

These results caught computer scientist and lead author Alexander Maye from the University of Hamburg by surprise: "I would have never guessed that simple flies who otherwise keep bouncing off the same window have the capacity for nonrandom spontaneity if given the chance."

Great fly graphics too.

I am not sure - as I said earlier - that the researchers have discovered in flies what humans mean by free will. They have discovered something that natural philosophers have always known: Life forms, even simple ones, are not like machines.

Life forms pursue goals generated from within themselves. The difference between your computer and the fly buzzing around your computer is not merely that the fly is vastly more complex than your computer.

A much more important difference is that the fly does not need you to tell it how to be a fly. Your computer, by contrast, has no internal motives or goals and will do nothing you don't ask for (or that someone somewhere in the software industry didn't ask for), except by accident.

The researchers had expected to find that flies behaved like computers (with natural selection presumably playing the role of the software engineer), but they did not.

Contrary to the hopes of the artificial intelligence (AI) crowd, making the computer more complex would probably not give it what the fly has naturally. The fly's autonomy (or spontanaeity, as the researchers called it) is an aspect of life, as opposed to mechanism, that we do not yet understand. I am sure it is understandable in principle, but continued adherence to materialism makes it unlikely that we will understand any time soon.

In that context, the articles I have seen on this subject so far close with the fond hope that this discovery will enable us to build robots that have an inner sense of purpose and provide a (mechanical) fix for people with mental problems that inhibit spontaneity. Sigh.

Artificial intelligence: Making the whole universe intelligent?

Ray Kurzweil's current artificial intelligence prognostication is a yet grander dream than the conscious computer (which was supposed to be here already, but don't let that detain us): The intelligent universe. In his forward to James Gardner's book of that name, he says,

Where is all this headed? It is leading inexorably to the intelligent universe that Jim Gardner envisions. Consider the following: As with all of the other manifestations of information technology, we are also making exponential gains in reverse-engineering the human brain. The spatial resolution in 3D volume of in-vivo brain scanning is doubling each year, and the latest generation of scanners is capable of imaging individual interneuronal connections and seeing them interact in real time. For the first time, we can see the brain create our thoughts, and also see our thoughts create our brain (that is, we create new spines and synapses as we learn). The amount of data we are gathering about the brain is doubling each year, and we are showing that we can turn this data into working models and simulations.

The idea is to meld brains and computers to create super brains, and tomorrow the universe. In my humble opinion, it would be well to address some issues in basic nervous system physiology like this one and this one before moving on to take over the universe, as Kurzweil and Gardner suggest.

The whole introduction is worth a read, if a little spacey. Kurzweil has some interesting things to say about the search for extra-terrestrial life (he doesn't think the ETs are really out there):

My own conclusion is that they don’t exist. If it seems unlikely that we would be in the lead in the universe, here on the third planet of a humble star in an otherwise undistinguished galaxy, it’s no more perplexing than the existence of our universe with its ever so precisely tuned formulas to allow life to evolve in the first place

Perplexing? No, Ray, it's just a very strong signal, that's all. At any rate, you can tell that the search for ET has lost its oomph! when people like Ray Kurzweil express skepticism.

Check out The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary (Harper 2007).