Cowen falls for the illusion of the chess-playing Turk

He writes, in reference to chess-playing programs:

"That gap--between our perception of superior human intellect and its actual reality--is the sobering lesson of the programs."

Cowen seems to forget how these "superior" chess-playing programs came into being. They were, of course, built by human beings. When a grandmaster is "shredded" by a computer program, he is really being defeated by a team of programmers and chess experts who have a calculation machine at their disposal. Just because they don't literally sit inside the machine, as a human being did inside the chess-playing Turk, does not mean that the machine has somehow mysteriously "become intelligent," any more than a rabbit trap is intelligent because it "knows" how to catch a rabbit. Machines can be "intelligent" only in that they can be "intelligently built."

Comments

  1. Not to mention that the way humans play chess is qualitatively different than the way machines do (or rather programmers do through their machines).

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  2. Gene,

    I'm surprised that you take this view; I don't think it's wrong, it's just that all the programmers that I speak to are usually on the side of computers being thinking machines.

    It reminds me of the old quip from Alan Turing; when asked if computers 'thought', he said that this is akin to asking if fish could swim; they 'do it all the time'.

    Hmmm, this is a complex issue. I'll have to get back after I collect my thoughts.

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  3. Well, what about if or when machines become self-programming?

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    Replies
    1. There are already computers that "write programs." This just means that they are following a human written program that outputs code. Nothing of any importance rests on what the particular output of a program is.

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  4. Do you think Man was simply intelligently built by God to do certain things, like make choices?

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  5. Gene, why should the *origin story* of a thing tell us whether it is intelligent or not? And what origin criteria do humans satisfy that makes us *intelligent*?

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    Replies
    1. I did not say anything at all about *origin stories* telling us if something is intelligent, marris.

      Delete

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