Ok, i apologize if i have misjudged your intentions, that you weren't trying to insult me. I went a little overboard there, i'm sure your friends and you are competent people deserving of your statuses.
Yes, you are correct, I have come to a viewpoint that all problems can be solved by throwing enough computers and data at it. This was informed by arguments in ai. See for example, jurgen schmidhuber's website, or genetic programming at john koza's website.
I agree, many problems are in a sense "easy", and human's can solve them. However, my belief is that those are the problems that have already been solved. The difficult problems, the ones that have not yet been solved, might well be too difficult for humans to comprehend. Computation is cheap enough now that it should be the default first step to try to brute force a solution. Even in high school, teach students how to describe problems as an optimization. Don't bother teaching them equation solving. Analytical solutions are sometimes needed, let that be a specialization for advanced undergraduates or even graduate school.
This is kind of like the reductionism vs non-reductionism argument. In physics simple laws were discovered, however, in biology this will not be possible.
>Ok, i apologize if i have misjudged your intentions, that you weren't trying to insult me. I went a little overboard there, i'm sure your friends and you are competent people deserving of your statuses.
An I apologize as well, as my statements clearly could have been made in a more conciliatory tone.
>Yes, you are correct, I have come to a viewpoint that all problems can be solved by throwing enough computers and data at it.
This may eventually become true, but we still have a lot of progress before we get there. I suspect that when it does become true, computers will look a lot more like animal brains than the computers of today, or maybe they will look like something completely different from either.
>This was informed by arguments in ai. See for example, jurgen schmidhuber's website, or genetic programming at john koza's website.
After a very cursory look, it appears that Dr. Koza has a very pragmatic attitude about genetic algorithms and is well aware of their limitations, and thus choses to focus his efforts on areas where they are most applicable. On the other hand, Dr. Schmidhuber seems to have staked his legacy on the idea that computers will soon be able to solve absolutely any problem better than humans can, and is passionately trying to spread this vision. He may very well be proven correct in the end, but I tend to be deeply skeptical of predictions made by such visionaries.
>I agree, many problems are in a sense "easy", and human's can solve them.
Some problems that are easy for humans are hard for computers, and some problems that are easy for computers are hard for humans. I assume that's why you put "easy" in quotes: problems that are "easy" for humans.
>However, my belief is that those are the problems that have already been solved. The difficult problems, the ones that have not yet been solved, might well be too difficult for humans to comprehend.
We may very well eventually reach a point where we truly have solved all of the problems within our capacity as humans, but that day is so far off that everyone alive today will be ancient history by then. Often, solving one problem reveals several more interesting problems that we hadn't even considered before.
>Computation is cheap enough now that it should be the default first step to try to brute force a solution.
This may be true for some classes of problems, but it is still not true for many, and will never be true for some. Consider cryptography: "brute force" only works if you have considerably more computation power than the computer(s) used to perform the encryption in the first place. However, if you can find a flaw in the encrption scheme to exploit, you might even be able to get by with less computation power.
>Even in high school, teach students how to describe problems as an optimization. Don't bother teaching them equation solving. Analytical solutions are sometimes needed, let that be a specialization for advanced undergraduates or even graduate school.
This would be a very, very bad idea. In order to use a tool like machine learning properly, you need a solid understanding of the problems you are trying to solve, so that you can frame them properly for the machine. Furthermore, there are many pragmatic real-world problems that require analytical solutions, much more than could be addressed by a small body of specialists. I think that basic programming concepts like iteration and recursion should be taught in secondary school (possibly even primary school), and I could definitely see adding basic concepts of optimization to that curriculum, but analytical thinking is so critical that taking it out would be an enormous mistake.
When is say analytical, i mean in the sense that mathematics can be used. By optimization, i mean a set of parameters that are tuned by minimizing a function with computers.
On computational power, we'll have to to agree to disagree. I believe self-driving cars and ng's helicopter are examples of why i think computing power is sufficient, there are many others (how kinect,google goggles,ibm watson etc etc. were built. There are also the "humie" awards in genetic programming which compete with traditional engineering). In engineering, finite element analysis has taken over. It is more human intensive than straight up machine learning but it's an example nevertheless of compute power displacing humans. I expect finite element analysis to be overtaken by machine learning too in many of it's applications as awareness/trust in machine learning gains mindshare.
Really, my basic point is, forget what you know, start afresh, and put faith in brute force searches. In natural language processing this happened 20 years ago and they made great progress, in computer vision this is happening right now, and these two fields are the toughest in my humble opinion. What they do, surely other fields can learn from.
Yes, you are correct, I have come to a viewpoint that all problems can be solved by throwing enough computers and data at it. This was informed by arguments in ai. See for example, jurgen schmidhuber's website, or genetic programming at john koza's website.
I agree, many problems are in a sense "easy", and human's can solve them. However, my belief is that those are the problems that have already been solved. The difficult problems, the ones that have not yet been solved, might well be too difficult for humans to comprehend. Computation is cheap enough now that it should be the default first step to try to brute force a solution. Even in high school, teach students how to describe problems as an optimization. Don't bother teaching them equation solving. Analytical solutions are sometimes needed, let that be a specialization for advanced undergraduates or even graduate school.
This is kind of like the reductionism vs non-reductionism argument. In physics simple laws were discovered, however, in biology this will not be possible.