

Emergent Intelligence - chetan51
http://chetansurpur.com/blog/2013/08/emergent-intelligence.html

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oh_teh_meows
While it is true that seemingly complex phenomena may unfold from interactions
between a few simple rules, and that the human brain is also a complex
structure composed of repeating basic units, i.e. neurons, by no means we
could also conclude that the intelligence housed in our brain is also an
emergent phenomena.

Our intelligence could just as well be a complicated mesh of a huge number of
'rules' that have evolved over a long period of time in response to many
difficult situations that had threatened the survival of our ancestors. They
are also what we call intuition/pre-born knowledge/natural tendencies and
reflex responses.

Having said that, we have not ruled out the possibility of intelligence
(albeit of a form different than ours) arising as an emergent phenomena from
simple rules. But if we were to replicate human intelligence on silicon, I'm
more inclined to believe that we'll have to 'manually' encode a huge number of
situation-specific rules, e.g. when you see wriggly thing run away.

~~~
chetan51
Actually, there's a growing amount of evidence that there's a single, general-
purpose algorithm in the human brain that gives rise to intelligence. For one,
there's the fact that every part of the brain looks and behaves the same.
There's also the fact that the brain is very plastic in what it learns – the
auditory cortex can learn to "see" if we were to rewire the signals from the
eyes from the visual cortex to the auditory cortex. It's very unlikely that
our brain is hard-wired to recognize faces, for instance, but rather that it
learns to do so using this generic learning algorithm.

I urge you to watch Andrew Ng's talk that I linked to in the post, and read On
Intelligence ([http://www.amazon.com/On-Intelligence-Jeff-
Hawkins/dp/080507...](http://www.amazon.com/On-Intelligence-Jeff-
Hawkins/dp/0805078533)) by Jeff Hawkins, a book that totally changed the way I
look at intelligent behavior.

~~~
oh_teh_meows
Yep I've seen his talk. It's quite fascinating. However, what you're talking
about is a learning algorithm, which does not necessarily equate with
intelligence. OpenCyc would be the best example that illustrates my point.
Edit: on second thought, you probably meant to say that given such a general
purpose learning algorithm, and a suitable environment, the algorithm would in
time learn enough to produce intelligence of some kind (of what kind, I'm not
sure) that's capable of thinking. In that case, I agree with you, and I'll
have to revise my opinion, but I'm still not sure if it qualifies as emergent
phenomena from simple rules. An analogy would be Google's search algorithm
running on huge amounts of data. Would you call the search results an emerging
phenomena from simple rules?

~~~
chetan51
The most concrete version of my point is that I don't think the most powerful
AI we'll create will have, for instance, a human-coded algorithm for detecting
faces. Instead, it'll have the ability to read electrical signals from a
camera and understand the changing patterns in them, including the presence of
faces. This ability to understand changing patterns would be due to "simpler"
rules than the rules specifically designed to understand faces.

So yes, a general purpose learning algorithm, using the correct paradigm,
would learn to think in a way as powerful as we do. And it'll do so in a way
that its programmers would never be able to predict.

In the same vein, I would say that Google search results is an emerging
phenomena, albeit not quite as interesting as general purpose intelligence.
This is because it's intractable to predict what Google will return for
certain queries, even if we know all of its rules. Keep in mind that there are
degrees of emergence, it's not black and white. (On the other hand, I don't
think Google's algorithm is as "simple" as it originally was, but that's for
another discussion.)

------
mathattack
When I first read John Holland's book on Emergence it opened my eyes to an
exciting new field.

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0738201421](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0738201421)

I'm not sure if we can solve AI in an 8 bit cellular automata, but the general
concept of intelligence emerging versus being designed certainly rings true
with human evolution.

