A.I. still don't think so...

Sometimes I promise to return to a topic and never do (e.g. this one, optimistically labelled 'part one') and sometimes I stick doggedly to a topic that I find interesting (e.g. my obsession with non-Skaldic Norse verse last year) in defiance of dwindling interest and declining readership. I'm sure you will all be delighted to see that today I am returning to my theme of the week: Artificial Intelligence.

Steve from Weymouth posted on my alter-ego's Facebook page that he agrees with me about the non-imminence of the Singularity (the hypothesised point at which machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence) but wants to know whether I think it will always be unachievable.

Persecuted genius Alan Turing was the first to point out that 'Can machines think?' is basically a meaninglessly unanswerable question and replaced it with the rather less snappy: "Is it true that by modifying a computer to have an adequate storage, suitably increasing its speed of action and providing it with an appropriate programme, it can be made to play satisfactorily the part of 'A' in the Imitation game?" (The imitation game - now usually called the Turing Test - is the game where an interrogator has to guess which of two screened off interviewees is a machine and which a person.) 

Turing predicted in a paper written in 1950 (well worth a read) that a computer with a storage capacity of 10 to the power 9 would be available by the end of the century and would be adequate to the task. Your average Playstation 3 could perform nearly two trillion floating point operations per second if called on to do so (and you use it to shoot zombies - shame on you). Infinite (in the narrow sense that more space could be created faster than we could fill it) amounts of information can be stored in the Cloud. So presumably we are just waiting for the relevant program to be written. It hasn't been written. And you'd think that the $100,000 Loebner Prize on offer since 1995 would be sufficient incentive.

Designing a computer programme of greater intelligence than a human being is a conceptually difficult idea. Is it even a possibility, given that the designer is human (or a machine of equivalent human intelligence)? Almost by definition, such a programme must have the capability to design and solve questions that a human cannot consider. So how can a human designer instil such a capability?

There may be more of this later in the week. It's something I clearly need to get out of my system. But today's my day off so I'm off to the White Lion for a pint. 

A.I. don't think so.

The Singularity - that point where machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence - is apparently widely assumed to be imminent. My pal Alice recently brought this article to my attention. The author writes in a chatty digressive style with amusing graphs and gifs but essentially his argument appears to be this:

1.The information processing abilities of computers have increased and will continue to increase.

2.The increase of information processing abilities will one day equate to human intelligence.

3.A machine functioning at this level will be able to improve itself so that it will surpass human intelligence.

I think that we can all agree that (1.) is a sound proposition but (2.) I think has some fundamental flaws that I will address today and (3.) has some fundamental flaws that I might address in the future if this post generates any interest or I am stuck for an idea..

When it comes to computations, computers have the edge. When IBM computer Deep Blue played chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov, it did not intuit the beauty of the game as any six-year-old might. Nor did it win by calculating the best move logically. The computer was programmed with the knowledge of millions of games and their outcomes and processed these - choosing moves that in identical situations had led to victory for other players. An impressive enough feat of processing power - but bears no relation to how humans think even about something as trivial as chess. Kasparov might as well have been playing a committee of a hundred grandmasters with access to all the books. He was convinced that he could have beaten Deep Blue in a rematch by taking the games in less well documented directions, but IBM had their headlines and their increased stock value and research into chess computing ceased. Kasparov continued to play and became involved in progressive Russian politics. Deep Blue was dismantled - half of it is on display at the National Museum of American History. 

A game I found in the White Lion that had no rules with it.

An output from a computation can only be random or determined by its program. So a simple chess program might make a random move to start with, then make moves determined by its program. A key part of human intelligence is creativity. I remember as a child in chess club getting bored with playing chess and inventing new games to play with the pieces. Ascribing the pieces new moves that increased or decreased their powers. What if bishops moved like queens? What if you make one move, then I make two, then you make three and so on? A computer program cannot do this. It is limited by its nature. This creative output of human intelligence is neither random nor determined by programming - I had after all been programmed with the rules of chess (if not with the discipline to apply them for the full hour) - and these are the only two options available to the computer.

The problem of creative endeavour in humans is not understood. We know it happens and we experience it whenever we paint a watercolour, compose a song or engage in conversation. We have no explanation for it. To design computer programs that mimic or produce this function will require radical new ideas that explain how it works in humans. It may be a problem that human minds are incapable of solving. The futurologists who predict an imminent Singularity seem to think that these 'hard' problems of consciousness and creativity will themselves be solved by the increasingly intelligent machines. But I don't buy it. An increase in computing power alone will not give birth to human level machine intelligence and that is a minimum requirement we must demand if machines are going to solve our problems for us.

I'm off to play the calculation engine at my favourite chess website Hopefully, it will not tip the board over if it starts to lose.

  

The Day of the Pancakes

Some pancake related thoughts. For my international readership - you should know that, growing up in England, we only ate pancakes once a year: on Shrove Tuesday. And the only topping we ever had was bottled lemon juice (or occasionally and excitingly a small plastic lemon filled with bottled lemon juice) and sugar. As a child who hated green vegetables and the like, the idea that once a year you were allowed to eat sugar for dinner was immensely appealing.

But travel broadens the mind. On family holidays to France, it quickly became apparent that our neighbours over the channel had pancakes (crepes) pretty much whenever they liked. And not just au citron. They would have them with much more exotic toppings like Nutella - the inventor of which died this week (I like to be topical).

Intercontinental travel broadens the mind still further. I first went to America aged seventeen. Officially half a lifetime ago since my birthday at the beginning of the month. You can do the math(s). My flight from Minneapolis to Denver was cancelled. The airline put me up in a hotel and paid for my breakfast. A tower of pancakes fried in butter with crispy bacon and maple syrup. Literally a tower. A tower has to be taller than it is wide. Good thing the airline bumped me up to First Class because I don't think I would have fitted into Economy after that breakfast.

Perhaps the most important development in the history of the pancake came about five years ago when my friend and sometime housemate manics rehash invented The Wasabi and Maple Syrup Pancake. Quite the experimental chef, I think he can sometimes go a tablespoon of anchovy paste too far, but he really nailed it with this one. I recommend that you all try it this week. Unless you are British of course, in which case you only have four hours before you have to wait a year...   

Crystal Update

I promised to update you on the potassium aluminium sulphate crystals I started growing in my airing cupboard. Due to the misleading nature of this blogpost's title and its accompanying photo, it proved to be my most popular post ever - garnering over 200 hits in the first hour. Which just goes to show no matter how long you spend carefully tailoring philosophical insights to delight your intended audience all they really want is the possibility of cheap drugs.

I'd always imagined growing crystals to be a spectacularly exciting thing to do. When I had my first chemistry set, I dutifully performed under appropriate supervision all the experiments included in the set except one: I was never allowed to grow copper sulphate crystals. My mother had read in the newspaper the story of a child who died as a result of waking thirsty in the night and, blindly groping in the dark, necking his copper sulphate solution instead of his glass of water. 

That didn't deter me though. I just figured I would wait twenty-three years until I was old enough to conduct my own experiments. But that I would conduct it safely in the airing cupboard because, as my mother knew all along, I am a terrible one for waking thirsty in the night and, blindly groping in the dark, necking the nearest wet thing to me. For all I know, potassium aluminium sulphate solution tastes exactly the same as three-day-old dusty ribena.

Over the course of a few weeks I turned this... 

...into this:

And now I have a load of aluminium sulphate crystals hanging around that really serve no purpose. They are not even very decorative. 

Barstools and Beer Bottles

Early on in my bartending career, I had a barstool thrown at me. To be fair, I don't think the punter in question intended me as the target. He was just throwing a barstool out of sheer rage at the unfairness of a world in which he wouldn't be served another drink in that establishment and it happened to head in my direction. He then stood in the centre of the pub glaring at everyone and shouting, "Bring your best man out - I'll fight him - send out your best man!" One of the regulars, a smart traveler girl called Mel, yelled back "He's behind you." The drunkard who wanted to fight the world whirled around to face a rather tubby and scared-looking Dorset police officer who had responded to a call and wasted no time radioing for back-up.

That was more than a decade ago. This week's nutter had a bottle to hand. And the intended target was definitely me...

Normally, I leave the dealing with nutters part of the job to the boss, but he was going loco down in Cancun. A man who looked drunk and wired had been muttering obscenities and was getting louder and people were starting to notice and feel uncomfortable. When I suggested that he move on after that drink he became abusive and threatening, emptying out his beer bottle onto the floor and holding it by the neck weapon-style. "Do you know who I am?" He asked before telling me (information which was extremely handy when I later reported the incident to the police). I bravely legged it down to the bottom bar and screamed "What the hell?" (the chosen swearword may have been stronger than this) as the bottle flew past me and lodged itself in a cardboard box full of spare glasses. 

Fortunately, the pub's pool team, the Temple Hashtags, were casually thrashing the Maid Marian Maids at their chosen sport in the bottom bar and responded promptly to my cry for assistance. The sudden appearance of six men, some of them with pool cues (although any experienced pub-goer knows that pool-players care far too much about their cues to use them as weapons) was sufficient to see my would-be assailant off into the night.

Now I consider myself to be a liberal person. But people who throw things at other people deserve, and I don't want to sound harsh here but I honestly think these hurlers of barstools and breakers of bottles deserve up to TEN (no wait ten might not be enough let's say twenty) deserve up to TWENTY hours of anger management counselling and a HUNDRED pound fine to be given to the hurlee. Actually make that TWO HUNDRED pounds. (I want to buy myself a Chromebook.) 

 

January Daffs

As you can imagine, the Xmas and New Year's holiday is an incredibly busy time for philosophers poets bartenders. So apologies for being away from my laptop for a month or more. My new year's resolution was to write a blogpost a week, a poem a month and a novel by the end of the year. Today is the fourteenth of January and I have just switched on my laptop for the first time. After I switched it on, I nipped out to do the shopping while it warmed itself up. (With a six-year-old computer there is no point asking it to do anything in the first thirty minutes, it will just have a tantrum and make you start all over again.) Lidl is selling British daffodils! Did I mention that today is the fourteenth of January? Does that seem a little early for daffodils to anybody else? Somebody must be farming them.

Obviously, with the new blogpost a week format that I won't be sticking to, you can expect the quality to be quite variable. I want to share an anecdote from work about a man who threw a glass bottle at me, but I'm still working on how to relate the story truthfully but make myself look like less of a coward - so I'll save that one for later.

So laptops and daffodils this week - meh - but keep checking back for pictures of broken glass and a severely damaged cardboard box and a suitably embellished tale of bartenderly heroics.

Ask Finnginn II: The Recursion Excusion

An emergency call has come through on the flashing red telephone I keep handy in case anybody has any obscure questions they are unable to google.

"Finn! Can you please explain: "Soldiers soldiers soldiers fight fight fight."?

I don't actually have a flashing red telephone, but I do have a facebook account and I am always pleased to receive your obscure questions as it saves me having to think up something to write about. The question is beautifully googleproof so, even though I started to answer it on my facebook page, I thought it deserved a fuller treatment here for posterity.

The sentence, "Soldiers soldiers soldiers fight fight fight", has been devised by wily linguists to show the limitations of the human mind's ability to parse overly recursive sentences.

A couple of technical definitions: To parse is, broadly speaking, to read and make sense of a sentence. Recursion is the property of language that allows a category to include an instance of itself. For example, a sentence may consist of two sentences linked by "if... then...". A verb phrase can be constructed from a verb and a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase. (Irrelevantly, the verb phrase, "...can be constructed from a verb and a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase," also happens to be an example of itself - but that's just me showing off.)

Back to our main plot:

"Soldiers soldiers soldiers fight fight fight" is an example of a triple embedded sentence. Triply embedded sentences are on the borderline of parsability. We can't understand them but we can understand how they would be understood if our brains were capable of it.

Let's break it down.

"Soldiers fight" is a sentence any native speaker can parse.

"Soldiers that soldiers fight also fight" is a similarly understandable sentence. 

In English, the "that" and the "also" are optional. We can lose them and have the double embedded sentence, "Soldiers soldiers fight fight". This sentence works in the same way as "Doors I close stay shut", or "Girls Georgie-Porgie kisses cry." It is a bit more confusing because both nouns are the same and one of the verbs is transitive and the other intransitive, but we can pretty much work out which verb belongs to which regiment and get a pretty clear picture of what is going on.

Now, if "Soldiers soldiers fight fight" is a legitimate sentence then we should be able to use the principle of recursion to plonk it down in the middle of "Soldiers fight" and give us our target sentence of "Soldiers soldiers soldiers fight fight fight". In fact we should be able to use the principle of recursion to extend our "soldiers" and our "fight" out to infinity.

Our human brains are capable of understanding that principle, but incapable of parsing a triple embedded sentence.