Monday, December 06, 2004

Human, not so human

"At some point, millions of calculations per minute transformed itself into intuition." - Just in case anyone was tempted to believe this, let me add that computer viruses are dangerous microbes.
I believe his point is that we must be careful not to ascribe human characteristics to non-living things. I think this is a fair criticism; but, for me, it raises the question of whether we are correctly describing the human activity in the first place. What do we really mean when we use the word "intuition" to describe our human approach to chess if a machine can find moves through a completely different approach which are indistinguishable from our own?

Anonymitch asks, "Does intelligence require consciousness?" and answers:
I think not.

It used to be that we thought it required intelligence to play a good game of chess. Machines can now play better chess than most any human. So, either the unconscious machines are intelligent or playing chess requires no intelligence.

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