reply to post by letthereaderunderstand
reply to post by letthereaderunderstand
Here, let me simplify it for you when it comes to the emails. What you just said about reviewing who sent it to you and the subject line. Computers
cannot do this. They can't understand English or any written language yet.
When it sees the word Hello, all the computer sees is 0100100001100101011011000110110001101111 and that is ALL it sees. It does not know what the word
Hello means.
If it helps, imagine that you have a very low IQ and the email is written in hieroglyphics. We can't teach you how to read because your IQ is too low
(not enough CPU power).
Then I told you to filter my email. All you would see when you saw the subject line are symbols. All you could do is match them to symbols you'd
seen before, but you wouldn't know what they meant.
So, I might tell you something like remove all the emails with the symbol Viagra and email sent from people I don't know. Okay, you can see the
symbol Viagra, but you don't understand what Viagra is. You just see gibberish.
So the next day my wife decides to get a new email address. Also, she decides to email me a joke about Viagra which is not uncommon. Well guess what?
It's an email address you haven't seen before and it has the symbol Viagra. According to my rules you delete it. It's spam right?
But then I get mad because any moron can see that was an email from my wife!!! lol. She just got a new address is all! But you didn't know that. All
you can see is the gibberish and you don't even understand what a wife is.
We can't teach the computer to read because we don't even understand completely how humans read yet and a computer can only follow mathematical
rules. If we can't describe something completely in mathematical terms to a computer then the computer can not learn how to do it.
When it comes to non-computable problems these are a class of mathematical problems that you'll have to Google. There are many well known ones and
big prizes for anyone that can solve one of them.
They are simply math problems that have no equation that can solve them directly. Ever! no matter how much power you throw at it. Like the halting
problem and others.
You have to go back to that old expression, do you want it done fast, or do you want it done right?
A computer can do it a billion times faster than you, but for some problems, it can never do as well as a human could taking their sweet old time like
figuring out your wife got a new email address because it doesn't know what a wife is yet.
And yes, when you see someone's face like your mother or your father you recognize them instantly because you "know" them. But how do you know
them? You have to describe it as a mathematical equation. If you can do that we can teach a computer to do it, but how do you know them? How does your
brain do it? That's what we need to know. We don't need to know what the brain is doing like reading, we need to know HOW the brain reads.
Is it hardwired in? How is it hardwired in so we can hardwire it into a computer? Do our brains do like it a computer does where it measures all the
angles of your face and the distance between your eyes and the size of your lips to see who it's looking at? Or do our brains use some other kind of
math? Do our brains use something other than math to recognize faces?
Because if so a computer will never be able to do it like that. They only work on math.
So yes, the devil is in the details. It's easy to say, well yes we know our parents, but how do we do it? What's the equation to make it work?
What's the trick? How are the neurons wired? Nobody knows this yet.
And back the throwing "badly", My point was, people don't realize how complicated a bad throw is until they sit down and try to do that as an
equation. It's far more complicated than anyone could imagine once you realize that when someone throws badly it always goes a different direction.
All of a sudden we're not dealing with equations anymore. We're dealing with randomness and that's very hard for computers to manage.
Also, computers aren't as fast as everyone thinks. If you tried to simulate every single electrical process going on in a three old's brain when
they try to throw a ball "badly" it would bring a super computer to its knees if one didn't take some very smart shortcuts and skip some very
important details.
We're not as far away from punch cards as one would imagine. One or two instructions is still all it takes to max out a CPU and lock the whole
computer up if they're not put in the right place. Just one! They may be very very fast, but we don't realize how complicated we are too. 100
billion neurons and as many as 500 billion to a quadrillion synapses and we can only model about 20 to 30 million of those on today's top end
hardware before they run out of power.
Got a long way to go and even when we get there, we're still missing the equations that make humans work. Fast computer won't help when you don't
know what instructions to give it. We have to figure that out first.
[edit on 20-10-2009 by tinfoilman]
[edit on 20-10-2009 by tinfoilman]