[GreenMan]

1eyedjack, on 2015-June-20, 12:59, said:

Not a good analogy I think. Unless the cartoon was written 5 years ago, in which case the reference to 5 years may be valid. These days if you take a picture of a bird, you expect software to identify it as a bird. Maybe 5 years ago you might have had a problem.

The fact that one hard problem was eventually solved does not mean that another problem is easy to solve. The illustration holds up fine.

[barmar]

The point of the cartoon is that it's not always obvious what things are easy and hard for computers to do. Even for actual computer scientists -- many AI researchers in the 60's really thought we'd have something approaching HAL-level AI by 2001. Here we are, more than a decade later, and the closest we have is Siri, which is basically a clever facade on a search engine (and much the same with Watson, the computer that won Jeopardy).

[tx10s]

Stephen Tu, on 2015-June-18, 18:51, said:

I really don't know whether GIB can do this to begin with.


Even if it could do the first thing, why would it be able to figure out how to do the second, without careful instruction from a human on how to do this? Humans are good at inferring from previous experience how to think in analogous but not 100% identical situations. Computers are not, they basically have to be taught every single situation separately.


Computers aren't really inherently good at anything other than making lots of fast number calculations then deciding which subsequent instructions to execute depending on comparing the results of such calculations. They "know" basically nothing, knowledge is solely in the program itself, which is the product of human minds. If the human didn't specifically put instructions in on how to deal with something, the computer isn't going to figure it out and come out with the "similar but not exactly the same" code to handle it. The code either knows how to do something or it doesn't. It doesn't adapt, doesn't extrapolate, doesn't learn. Maybe decades in the future AI advances to the point where computer programs can adapt & self-program, but this stuff is really in its infancy research stages and is mostly still in the realm of science fiction.

It only knows how to throw out deals if a human teaches it very carefully how to throw out deals. And if the human tells it how to throw out deals in one situation, it can't work out how to extrapolate that to other situations. AFAIK it may only know how to bias the deals by the bidding database and actual cards played, and not know how to bias the deals based on signals and inferences like "lowest from equals by third hand".

Your surprise to me is mainly a factor of you not being a computer programmer, not realizing how incredibly stupid machines they are at the core. Programs do amazing things these days, but that's only because of tons of effort by humans to tell them exactly what to do, building on many millions of lines of code written by earlier generations of human programmers. But they still don't think like a human at all, all this effort is basically to create the *illusion* of human thought. Computer code basically boils down to add these numbers, subtract these others, compare, if a>b do this next, if a<=b do something else. They know nothing of suits, finesses, anything of bridge, it's all a bunch of numbers and calculations to do in a particular order exactly as some human programmer wrote down for it.

Computers are stupid. Don't expect too much out of them.

Can the same be said about computer programmers, since they determine what the program does?