
MIT IQ: The MIT Intelligence Quest - kamkha
http://iq.mit.edu/
======
kough
MIT is in the process of converting its brand's value into money. It's
interesting, because the brand is so strong that they probably can announce
even more stupid "quests" and "initiatives" and "labs" (like the IBM
"collaboration") to extract value from industry without seriously harming the
quality of the students who apply. But as a current student it's kind of
heartbreaking. This place has been so special for so long. But even MIT cannot
hold out against the corporate cancer that's been spreading through higher
education for the last twenty years.

EDIT: just wanted to add, I'd love to ask the marketing team behind this site
how they came up with _quest_. What the fuck is a quest, and how is it
different than all of these researchers just doing whatever they wanted,
anyway? MIT isn't funding these labs directly in most cases and the work has
been ongoing, it's just a branding exercise.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Colleges are businesses that deal in information and knowledge for money.

~~~
koopuluri
Colleges are businesses that provide a signal of competence, and a network of
peers who also want that signal, in exchange for money.

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enord
This is the high water mark, the summer solstice if you will, of the current
wave.

Buckle up, Serious People are going to rediscover the fundamental Hard
Problems and relocate the current Hot Topics into their appropriate
ontologies.

~~~
nopinsight
What is some evidence or reasoning that we are reaching certain hard limits as
you mentioned?

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randcraw
For example, machine translation from one human language to another has been
acclaimed as one of the big success areas in deep learning. But when one looks
deeper, there be dragons...

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-s...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-
shallowness-of-google-translate/551570/)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Oh wow. That's Douglas Hofstadter in great form. Could you please submit that
to HN so it has a chance to get to the fist page?

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Never mind- there's already a conversation. Thanks for posting anyway.

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rsiqueira
MIT is also giving the course Artificial General Intelligence at
[https://agi.mit.edu/](https://agi.mit.edu/) List of recommended articles and
papers (reading material for the AGI course): [https://agi.mit.edu/vote-
ai/](https://agi.mit.edu/vote-ai/)

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dogruck
Sounds like they are solving the exodus of brains to Industry by effectively
creating Industry-funded departments located on campus. “You will be an MIT
employee, fully funded by Google.”

~~~
7granddad
Near the bottom of the page:

> A key to the success of MIT IQ will be identifying industry allies who share
> our passion for tackling big, real-world problems. That work is already
> underway: we have forged a number of collaborative projects with industry,
> such as the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab.

However, the biggest incentive to go into industry is income. Sure, your
research and your department can do more with more funding but wouldn't you
still make about the same amount as a grad/research scientist/professor?

~~~
fjsolwmv
Maybe Google pays more than average for these positions.

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nopinsight
Related:

UC Berkeley launches Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence

[http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/08/29/center-for-human-
compati...](http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/08/29/center-for-human-compatible-
artificial-intelligence/)

[http://humancompatible.ai/](http://humancompatible.ai/)

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sebleon
> And today, by tapping the united strength of these and other interlocking
> fields and capitalizing on what they can teach each other, we seek to answer
> the deepest questions about intelligence — and to deliver transformative new
> gifts for humankind.

Ugh, this kind of corporate-speak is nauseating. Can anyone understand what
this "quest" actually entails?

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rdlecler1
Understanding the recipie and salient ingredients by which nature generates
intelligence so that we can build a theory of intelligence is long overdue but
they’re starting at too high of a level. We don’t have a good model for
artificial neurogenesis that allows us to create complex AI from a simpler set
of building blocks, we don’t have a genotype-to-phenotype mapping or a generic
representation to encode complex phenotypes in a mathematical genetic
abstraction, we don’t have an abstraction by which mutation can create open
ended phenotypic variation, we don’t have a model for artificial evolution to
drive the evolution of novelty.

If we want to solve this problem we’re going to have to reverse engineer
intelligence. Otherwise we’re just going to continue to run into walls by
trying to either brute force our way from the ground up and by ignore lessons
from biological intelligence or philosophize from the top down.

~~~
azinman2
What is the “problem?” Depending on what you’re trying to solve, you don’t
need to go as low level as possible — it’s likely a mistake as to try and
model the universe is a futile exercise.

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partycoder
I don't think connected neural ensembles made from a deep learning
architecture can scale to what we would call general artificial intelligence.

At least not with decades of manual supervision.

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d0100
For some reason I read it as "the MIT intelligence test", and was confused.

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goldenkey
I respect what they are doing but I disagree with the methods. Intelligence
could be one of those kind of things that is very hard to engineer directly.
And we'd have more success if we inspected the underlying processes and then
simulated those.

I've posted this before but here is my proposal: [https://scrollto.com/life-a-
universe-simulation/](https://scrollto.com/life-a-universe-simulation/)

What I propose is a minimum viable digital environment that can support the
creation of self-organized turing machines that feed off their environment.
What this really means is, coming up with a digital environment that can
support the evolutionary process. Evolution requires vast space, vast time (in
this case -- clock cycles), and principles that allow for both storage and
movement of information. The storage and movement of information is
accomplished most simply by roughly emulating mass/energy
conservation/conversion laws that we have in our universe. With just
collisions that form stationary quasiparticles, and can also annihilate to
reform the moving fundamental particles, universal computation is enabled.

Toffoli and Fredkin discovered the power of collision-based computing decades
ago. There is a lot of literature and good results they derived on the power
of these types of systems.

Let's create life the only way we know it formed -- evolution. It's far more
elegant and less engineered than trying to unravel how chaos formed
competitive results on a million-deep evolutionary ancestor tree.

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logfromblammo
Make sure you cull the programs that might end up escaping the sim and
destroying all humans.

~~~
goldenkey
If they figure out how to escape I think I'll let them have it.

