You mention Deep Blue beating Kasparov. This sounds look a good test case. I know that there were times when it was very controversial whether computers would ever be able to beat humans in chess—Wikipedia gives the example of a 1960s MIT professor who claimed that “no computer program could defeat even a 10-year-old child at chess”. And it seems to me that by the time Deep Blue beat Kasparov, most people in the know agreed it would happen someday even if they didn’t think Deep Blue itself would be the winner. A quick Google search doesn’t pull up enough data to allow me to craft a full narrative of “people gradually became more and more willing to believe computers could beat grand masters with each incremental advance in chess technology”, but it seems like the sort of thing that probably happened.
I think the economics example is a poor analogy, because it’s a question about laws and not a question of gradual creeping recognition of a new technology. It also ignores one of the most important factors at play here—the recategorization of genres from “science fiction nerdery” to “something that will happen eventually” to “something that might happen in my lifetime and I should prepare for it.”
I know that there were times when it was very controversial whether computers would ever be able to beat humans in chess
Douglas Hofstadter being one on the wrong side: well, to be exact, he predicted (in his book GEB) that any computer that could play superhuman chess would necessarily have certain human qualities, e.g., if you ask it to play chess, it might reply, “I’m bored of chess; let’s talk about poetry!” which IMHO is just as wrong as predicting that computers would never beat the best human players.
I thought you were exaggerating there, but I looked it up in my copy and he really did say that: pg684-686:
To conclude this Chapter, I would like to present ten “Questions and Speculations” about AI. I would not make so bold as to call them “Answers”—these are my personal opinions. They may well change in some ways, as I learn more and as AI develops more...
Question: Will there be chess programs that can beat anyone?
Speculation: No. There may be programs which can beat anyone at chess, but they will not be exclusively chess players. They will be programs of general intelligence, and they will be just as temperamental as people. “Do you want to play chess?” “No, I’m bored with chess. Let’s talk about poetry.” That may be the kind of dialogue you could have with a program that could beat everyone. That is because real intelligence inevitably depends on a total overview capacity—that is, a programmed ability to “jump out of the system”, so to speak—at least roughly to the extent that we have that ability. Once that is present, you can’t contain the program; it’s gone beyond that certain critical point, and you just have to face the facts of what you’ve wrought.
I wonder if he did change his opinion on computer chess before Deep Blue and how long before? I found two relevant bits by him, but they don’t really answer the question except they sound largely like excuse-making to my ears and like he was still fairly surprised it happened even as it was happening; from February 1996:
Several cognitive scientists said Deep Blue’s victory in the opening game of the recent match told more about chess than about intelligence. “It was a watershed event, but it doesn’t have to do with computers becoming intelligent,” said Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of computer science at Indiana University and author of several books about human intelligence, including “Godel, Escher, Bach,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980, with its witty argument about the connecting threads of intellect in various fields of expression. “They’re just overtaking humans in certain intellectual activities that we thought required intelligence. My God, I used to think chess required thought. Now, I realize it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean Kasparov isn’t a deep thinker, just that you can bypass deep thinking in playing chess, the way you can fly without flapping your wings.”...In “Godel, Escher, Bach” he held chess-playing to be a creative endeavor with the unrestrained threshold of excellence that pertains to arts like musical composition or literature. Now, he says, the computer gains of the last decade have persuaded him that chess is not as lofty an intellectual endeavor as music and writing; they require a soul. “I think chess is cerebral and intellectual,” he said, “but it doesn’t have deep emotional qualities to it, mortality, resignation, joy, all the things that music deals with. I’d put poetry and literature up there, too. If music or literature were created at an artistic level by a computer, I would feel this is a terrible thing.”
Kelly said to me, “Doug, why did you not talk about the singularity and things like that in your book?” And I said, “Frankly, because it sort of disgusts me, but also because I just don’t want to deal with science-fiction scenarios.” I’m not talking about what’s going to happen someday in the future; I’m not talking about decades or thousands of years in the future...And I don’t have any real predictions as to when or if this is going to come about. I think there’s some chance that some of what these people are saying is going to come about. When, I don’t know. I wouldn’t have predicted myself that the world chess champion would be defeated by a rather boring kind of chess program architecture, but it doesn’t matter, it still did it. Nor would I have expected that a car would drive itself across the Nevada desert using laser rangefinders and television cameras and GPS and fancy computer programs. I wouldn’t have guessed that that was going to happen when it happened. It’s happening a little faster than I would have thought, and it does suggest that there may be some truth to the idea that Moore’s Law [predicting a steady increase in computing power per unit cost] and all these other things are allowing us to develop things that have some things in common with our minds. I don’t see anything yet that really resembles a human mind whatsoever. The car driving across the Nevada desert still strikes me as being closer to the thermostat or the toilet that regulates itself than to a human mind, and certainly the computer program that plays chess doesn’t have any intelligence or anything like human thoughts.
To be fair, people expected a chess playing computer to play chess in the same way a human does, thinking about the board abstractly and learning from experience and all that. We still haven’t accomplished that. Chess programs work by inefficiently computing every possible move, so many moves ahead, which seemed impossible before computers got exponentially faster. And even then, deep blue was a specialized super-computer and had to use a bunch of little tricks and optimizations to get it just barely past human grand master level.
I was going to point that out too as I think it demonstrates an important lesson. They were still wrong.
Almost all of their thought processes were correct, but they still got to the wrong result because they looked at solutions too narrowly. It’s quite possible that many of the objections to AI, rejuvenation, cryonics, are correct but if there’s another path they’re not considering, we could still end up with the same result. Just like a Chess program doesn’t think like a human, but can still beat one and an airplane doesn’t fly like a bird, but can still fly.
I.e., they didn’t update to expecting HAL immediately after, and they were right for solid reasons. But I think that the polls, and moreso polls of experts do respond to advancements in technology, e.g. on self-driving cars or solar power.
Do we have any evidence that they updated to expecting HAL in the long run? Normatively, I agree that ideal forecasters shouldn’t be doing their updating on press releases, but people sometimes argue that press release W will cause people to update to X when they didn’t realize X earlier.
Yes, people now believe that computers can beat people at chess.
It was on our national television, few months ago. Kasparov was here, opened some international chess center for young players in Maribor. He gave an interview and among other things, he told us how fishy was the Deep Blue victory and not real in fact.
I notice I am confused (he said politely). Kasparov is not stupid and modern chess programs on a home computer e.g. Deep Rybka 3.0 are overwhelmingly more powerful than Deep Blue, there should be no reasonable way for anyone to delude themselves that computer chess programs are not crushingly superior to unassisted humans.
I seem to recall that there was some impoliteness surrounding the Deep Blue game specifically- basically, it knew every move Kasparov had ever played, but Kasparov was not given any record of Deep Blue’s plays to learn how it played (like he would have had against any other human chessplayer who moved up the chess ranks); that’s the charitable interpretation of what Kasparov meant by the victory being fishy. (This hypothetical Kasparov would want to play many matches against Deep Rybka 3.0 before the official matches that determine which of them is better- but would probably anticipate losing at the end of his training anyway.)
Nowadays, sure, but Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997. Kasparov has always claimed that IBM cheated during the rematch, supplementing Deep Blue with human insight. As far as I know there’s no evidence that he’s right, but he’s suspected very consistently for the last 15 years.
Actually, starting at and around the 30 minute mark in this video—an interview with Kasparov done in Maribor, a couple months ago, no less—he whines about the whole human versus machine match up a lot, suggests new winning conditions (human just has to win one game of a series to show superiority, since the “endurance” aspect is the machine “cheating”) which would redefine the result etcetera.
“Shame on him, who suspects illicit motivation” is given as one of the many possible translations. Don’t take the “shame” part too literally, but there is some irony in pointing out someone as a troll when the one comment you use for doing so turns out to be true, and interesting to boot (Kasparov engaging in bad-loser-let’s-warp-the-facts behavior).
I’m not taking a stance on the issue whether Thomas is or isn’t a troll, you were probably mostly looking for a good-seeming place to share your opinion about him.
(Like spotting a cereal thief in a supermarket, day after day. Then when you finally hold him and call the authorities, it turns out that single time he didn’t steal.)
Those were matches with Rybka handicapped (an odds match is a handicapped match) and Deep Rybka 3.0 is a substantial improvement over Rybka. The referenced “Zappa” which played Rybka evenly is another computer program. Read the reference carefully.
You mention Deep Blue beating Kasparov. This sounds look a good test case. I know that there were times when it was very controversial whether computers would ever be able to beat humans in chess—Wikipedia gives the example of a 1960s MIT professor who claimed that “no computer program could defeat even a 10-year-old child at chess”. And it seems to me that by the time Deep Blue beat Kasparov, most people in the know agreed it would happen someday even if they didn’t think Deep Blue itself would be the winner. A quick Google search doesn’t pull up enough data to allow me to craft a full narrative of “people gradually became more and more willing to believe computers could beat grand masters with each incremental advance in chess technology”, but it seems like the sort of thing that probably happened.
I think the economics example is a poor analogy, because it’s a question about laws and not a question of gradual creeping recognition of a new technology. It also ignores one of the most important factors at play here—the recategorization of genres from “science fiction nerdery” to “something that will happen eventually” to “something that might happen in my lifetime and I should prepare for it.”
Douglas Hofstadter being one on the wrong side: well, to be exact, he predicted (in his book GEB) that any computer that could play superhuman chess would necessarily have certain human qualities, e.g., if you ask it to play chess, it might reply, “I’m bored of chess; let’s talk about poetry!” which IMHO is just as wrong as predicting that computers would never beat the best human players.
I thought you were exaggerating there, but I looked it up in my copy and he really did say that: pg684-686:
I wonder if he did change his opinion on computer chess before Deep Blue and how long before? I found two relevant bits by him, but they don’t really answer the question except they sound largely like excuse-making to my ears and like he was still fairly surprised it happened even as it was happening; from February 1996:
And from January 2007:
I suspect the thermostat is closer to the human mind than his conception of the human mind is.
To be fair, people expected a chess playing computer to play chess in the same way a human does, thinking about the board abstractly and learning from experience and all that. We still haven’t accomplished that. Chess programs work by inefficiently computing every possible move, so many moves ahead, which seemed impossible before computers got exponentially faster. And even then, deep blue was a specialized super-computer and had to use a bunch of little tricks and optimizations to get it just barely past human grand master level.
I was going to point that out too as I think it demonstrates an important lesson. They were still wrong.
Almost all of their thought processes were correct, but they still got to the wrong result because they looked at solutions too narrowly. It’s quite possible that many of the objections to AI, rejuvenation, cryonics, are correct but if there’s another path they’re not considering, we could still end up with the same result. Just like a Chess program doesn’t think like a human, but can still beat one and an airplane doesn’t fly like a bird, but can still fly.
Yes, people now believe that computers can beat people at chess.
I.e., they didn’t update to expecting HAL immediately after, and they were right for solid reasons. But I think that the polls, and moreso polls of experts do respond to advancements in technology, e.g. on self-driving cars or solar power.
Do we have any evidence that they updated to expecting HAL in the long run? Normatively, I agree that ideal forecasters shouldn’t be doing their updating on press releases, but people sometimes argue that press release W will cause people to update to X when they didn’t realize X earlier.
It was on our national television, few months ago. Kasparov was here, opened some international chess center for young players in Maribor. He gave an interview and among other things, he told us how fishy was the Deep Blue victory and not real in fact.
At least a half of the population believed him.
I notice I am confused (he said politely). Kasparov is not stupid and modern chess programs on a home computer e.g. Deep Rybka 3.0 are overwhelmingly more powerful than Deep Blue, there should be no reasonable way for anyone to delude themselves that computer chess programs are not crushingly superior to unassisted humans.
I seem to recall that there was some impoliteness surrounding the Deep Blue game specifically- basically, it knew every move Kasparov had ever played, but Kasparov was not given any record of Deep Blue’s plays to learn how it played (like he would have had against any other human chessplayer who moved up the chess ranks); that’s the charitable interpretation of what Kasparov meant by the victory being fishy. (This hypothetical Kasparov would want to play many matches against Deep Rybka 3.0 before the official matches that determine which of them is better- but would probably anticipate losing at the end of his training anyway.)
That’s not everything he said.
Nowadays, sure, but Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997. Kasparov has always claimed that IBM cheated during the rematch, supplementing Deep Blue with human insight. As far as I know there’s no evidence that he’s right, but he’s suspected very consistently for the last 15 years.
Well, for that matter he also believes this stuff.
Request that Thomas be treated as a troll. I’m not sure if he’s actually a troll, but he’s close enough.
Edit: This isn’t primarily based on the above comment, it’s primarily based on this comment.
Actually, starting at and around the 30 minute mark in this video—an interview with Kasparov done in Maribor, a couple months ago, no less—he whines about the whole human versus machine match up a lot, suggests new winning conditions (human just has to win one game of a series to show superiority, since the “endurance” aspect is the machine “cheating”) which would redefine the result etcetera.
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
I looked this up but I don’t understand what it was intended to mean in this context.
“Shame on him, who suspects illicit motivation” is given as one of the many possible translations. Don’t take the “shame” part too literally, but there is some irony in pointing out someone as a troll when the one comment you use for doing so turns out to be true, and interesting to boot (Kasparov engaging in bad-loser-let’s-warp-the-facts behavior).
I’m not taking a stance on the issue whether Thomas is or isn’t a troll, you were probably mostly looking for a good-seeming place to share your opinion about him.
(Like spotting a cereal thief in a supermarket, day after day. Then when you finally hold him and call the authorities, it turns out that single time he didn’t steal.)
Hm. A brief glance at Thomas’s profile makes it hard to be sure. I will be on the lookout.
So why did you write that here rather than there?
Ah, right, the karma toll.
I thought it would be more likely to be seen by Eliezer if I responded to Eliezer.
Hm?
Those were matches with Rybka handicapped (an odds match is a handicapped match) and Deep Rybka 3.0 is a substantial improvement over Rybka. The referenced “Zappa” which played Rybka evenly is another computer program. Read the reference carefully.
Thanks.