Again, he plainly says more than that. He’s challenging “the conviction that the information processing underlying any cognitive performance can be formulated in a program and thus simulated on a digital computer.” He asserts as fact that certain types of cognition require hardware more like a human brain. Only two out of four areas, he claims, “can therefore be programmed.” In case that’s not clear enough, here’s another quote of his:
since Area IV is just that area of intelligent behavior in which the attempt to program digital computers to exhibit fully formed adult intelligence must fail, the unavoidable recourse in Area III to heuristics which presuppose the abilities of Area IV is bound, sooner or later, to run into difficulties. Just how far heuristic programming can go in Area III before it runs up against the need for fringe consciousness, ambiguity tolerance, essential/inessential discrimination, and so forth, is an empirical question. However, we have seen ample evidence of trouble in the failure to produce a chess champion, to prove any interesting theorems, to translate languages, and in the abandonment of GPS.
He does not say that better algorithms are needed for Area IV, but that digital computers must fail. He goes on to falsely predict that clever search together with “newer and faster machines” cannot produce a chess champion. AFAICT this is false even if we try to interpret him charitably, as saying more human-like reasoning would be needed.
The doc Jessicata linked has page numbers but no embedded text. Can you give a page number for that one?
Unlike your other quotes, it at least seems to say what you’re saying it says. But it appears to start mid-sentence, and in any case I’d like to read it in context.
Assuming you mean the last blockquote, that would be the Google result I mentioned which has text, so you can go there, press Ctrl-F, and type “must fail” or similar.
You can also read the beginning of the PDF, which talks about what can and can’t be programmed while making clear this is about hardware and not algorithms. See the first comment in this family for context.
Again, he plainly says more than that. He’s challenging “the conviction that the information processing underlying any cognitive performance can be formulated in a program and thus simulated on a digital computer.” He asserts as fact that certain types of cognition require hardware more like a human brain. Only two out of four areas, he claims, “can therefore be programmed.” In case that’s not clear enough, here’s another quote of his:
He does not say that better algorithms are needed for Area IV, but that digital computers must fail. He goes on to falsely predict that clever search together with “newer and faster machines” cannot produce a chess champion. AFAICT this is false even if we try to interpret him charitably, as saying more human-like reasoning would be needed.
The doc Jessicata linked has page numbers but no embedded text. Can you give a page number for that one?
Unlike your other quotes, it at least seems to say what you’re saying it says. But it appears to start mid-sentence, and in any case I’d like to read it in context.
Assuming you mean the last blockquote, that would be the Google result I mentioned which has text, so you can go there, press Ctrl-F, and type “must fail” or similar.
You can also read the beginning of the PDF, which talks about what can and can’t be programmed while making clear this is about hardware and not algorithms. See the first comment in this family for context.