
Artificial Intelligence Study of Human Genome Finds Unknown Human Ancestor - greenyoda
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/artificial-intelligence-study-human-genome-finds-unknown-human-ancestor-species-180971436/
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astazangasta
Okay, stop. Stop. This is called statistics. People have been using it to
analyze the human genome for decades, since we first had the sequence. I wrote
my thesis on such work a decade ago. This is not "artificial intelligence".
Enough already you clods.

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cs702
Respectfully, I have to disagree.

While it's true that deep learning reduces to "curve-fitting with stochastic
gradient descent," in practice, working with deep neural nets is and feels
_qualitatively different_ , even when they are used as universal function
approximators within a commonly used Bayesian framework, as is the case here.

Unlike the simpler statistical models of yore that identify easy-to-understand
(e.g., monotonic) relationships between variables, deep neural nets can find
relationships that in practice _cannot be articulated except on their own
terms_ \-- that is, they can be articulated only as long sequences of non-
linear transformations.

In my view, the word "intelligent" is probably the best we have today for
describing models that can learn to recognize patterns in data at such high
levels of abstraction, even if this kind of intelligence is very _narrow_ and
only of a _perceptual_ nature (i.e., there's no reasoning, planning,
creativity, etc.).

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beagle3
Things like Breiman’s ACE (alternating conditional expectation) are also
qualitatively different, in many ways more magical, but it is still just
statistics.

