
The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic - robgering
http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with-logic
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javajosh
Having read _Principia_ did Pitts read Kurt Goedel[1]? I would very much like
to know what he thought of it!

What an incredibly sad story - burning years of work in meloncholy, all thanks
to the lies of an angry woman. Wiener, though, shares a great deal of blame -
a man should not pass judgement in on his friends without inquiring into the
truth of the matter.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)

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dvt
Given that Gödel and Pitts most likely wrote to one another (although their
correspondence doesn't survive), it's very probable that they were intimately
familiar with the work of one another.

There's an entire chapter dedicated to Walter Pitts in Kurt Gödel: Collected
Works, Volume V.

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carapace
Such a terrible tragedy, both personal and for the world. I highly recommend
the book referenced: "Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert
Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics".

R.I.P. Walter Pitts

(One thing that troubles me slightly: this article mentions a possible cause
of the break between Wiener and the others which is presented as speculation
in the book, if I remember correctly, but stated here as a bald fact. In any
event I wish that Wiener hadn't acted so rashly.)

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xmonkee
This article is fascinating. I had no idea that the Von Neumann machine was an
extrapolation of a mental model. Even more fascinating, that the existince of
a symbolic computation machine made the possibility of purely symobolic
epistimology impossible. It's like they abstracted a lever higher than they
wanted to and then made a cleaner, simpler implementation of it. And now with
modern AI we are doubling down on that implementation and trying to build a
new kind of intelligence no top of it.

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gosub
Even Alan Turing, in "On computable numbers, with an application to the
Entscheidungsproblem", practically invents turing machines modelling how a
mathematician works: He has a pencil, some paper and a number of different
states inside his brain.

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tel
Everyone was directly motivated at the time to solve Hilbert's
Entscheidungsproblem [0] which was about mathematical proof not universal
machines. Turing, along with a few other mathematicians, recognized that
proofs involved notions of algorithms and computation and all, together,
generalized these into notions of computation we have today—Turing Machines,
Lambda Calculus, Recursive Functions. So it's not terribly surprising that
Turing's model was a human one. It was exactly his goal (originally).

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem)

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islon
"But three years later, when he heard that Russell would be visiting the
University of Chicago, the 15-year-old ran away from home and headed for
Illinois. He never saw his family again." Assuming that 80% of humanity lives
on less than $10 a day, and are, therefore, poor, I can just imagine the
number of geniuses born poor that will not ever be able to show their
geniality to the world.

Imagine how the world would be a better place with all these people working as
scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, etc.

~~~
droque
I've taught in (Mexican) state programs for gifted youth and I can testify
that a lot of the kids (many of them poor or almost) end up wasting their
potential and having hard times, monetary wise. Meanwhile, significantly less
hard working and less bright kids from private schools go on and get
comfortable jobs.

A local think tank ([http://pipe.cide.edu/talento-en-
mexico](http://pipe.cide.edu/talento-en-mexico)) calculated the economical
implications of not developing this talent. According to their model, on a 40
year span, developing it would give a 132% increase in the GDP per capita in
comparison with staying at current levels.

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tripzilch
> Nature had chosen the messiness of life over the austerity of logic, a
> choice Pitts likely could not comprehend.

Regarding "Nature had _chosen_ ...", I wonder if this was actually how Pitts
saw it (he seemed more clever than that), or whether it is the article's
author's misconception that he considered there is in fact something in Nature
that "chooses", instead of applying mechanistic rules entirely.

It is as if the part of the story about the frogs is meant to show that Nature
has a "spirit" after all, that evaded being captured in logic. I can't really
fathom why Pitts, after all his history, would come to that conclusion. Just
because the retina turned out to possess a certain amount of analog computing
power?

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axilmar
The brain doesn't do logic, it does pattern matching, and selects the
appropriate reaction based on the match that offers the biggest chances of
survival.

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gotrecruit
So basically Margaret Weisner was the Yoko of the scientific world?

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Animats
I thought that article was going to be about Leibniz, and his "let us
calculate" approach to decision making.

"What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain"
([http://neuromajor.ucr.edu/courses/WhatTheFrogsEyeTellsTheFro...](http://neuromajor.ucr.edu/courses/WhatTheFrogsEyeTellsTheFrogsBrain.pdf))
is still worth reading. It's the first paper on what is now called "early
vision".

I'm painfully familiar with that world view. I went through Stanford CS in
1983-1985, when logic-based AI was, in retrospect, having its last gasp. I
took "Dr. John's Mystery Hour", Epistemological Problems in Artificial
Intelligence, from John McCarthy. The logicians were making progress on
solving problems once they'd been hammered into just the right predicate
calculus form, but were getting nowhere in translating the real world into
predicate calculus.

For computer program verification, though, that stuff works. For a time, I was
fascinated by Boyer-Moore theory and their theorem prover. They'd redone
Russell and Whitehead with machine proofs. Constructive mathematics maps well
to what computers can do. I got the Boyer-Moore theorem prover (powerful,
could do induction, but slow) hooked up to the Oppen-Nelson theorem prover
(limited, only does arithmetic up to multiplication by constants, but fast)
and used the combination to build a usable proof-of-correctness system for a
dialect of Pascal. It worked fine; I used to invite people to put in a bug in
a working program and watch the system find it.

But it was clear that approach wasn't going to map to the messiness of the
real world. Working on proof of correctness for real programs made it
painfully clear how brittle formal logic systems are. Nobody was going to get
to common sense that way. The logicians were in denial about this for a long
time, which resulted in the "AI winter" from 1985 to 2000 or so.

Then came the machine learning guys, and progress resumed. Science progresses
one funeral at a time.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
And next come the probabilistic programming guys, I'd bet.

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nanis
I thought that was Spinoza.

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sowhatquestion
I was going to guess Hegel. Either one would work though

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vanderZwan
Wasn't Descartes partially motivated by the horrors of the Thirty Years war?

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javert
Ayn Rand?

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psychometry
I thought this was a joke until I read your HN profile. Then I discovered that
the joke is _much_ bigger than this solitary comment.

~~~
dang
Please don't post unduly personal comments on Hacker News.

