Now and then something goes by that puts human potential intelligence in perspective. Today I noticed that kottke had noticed that back in July, it was announced that “it is no longer possible for a human to win a game of checkers against a properly prepared machine.” Kottke had a link to a lengthy report from the BBC on how machines now win checkers and to a Gelf magazine analysis of which games humans can still win. Does the fact that a machine can beat us at any game diminish how we should feel about our intelligence? Hardly. The games we play have really simple rules and yet it took machines 50 years to beat us at checkers. And it was no machine that built the machine that now beats us at checkers. We built it.
Now and then something goes by that puts human potential intelligence in perspective. Today I noticed that kottke had noticed that back in July, it was announced that “it is no longer possible for a human to win a game of checkers against a properly prepared machine.” Kottke had a link to a lengthy report [...]
Comments
@ 18:52
Machines have been able to beat us over any distance in land or water for a century, or centuries. They have been able to beat us at weightlifting for millennia. I don’t think this diminishes how we feel about our strength, speed, stamina and so on.
So it’s interesting that we might think that machines using brute force algorithms have any relation to our intelligence at all (except perhaps that we program them
john