There are many classes of problems in computer science and AI falls into one of my favorites. If today the world had a machine with infinite CPU power and infinite RAM we still wouldn't have a good AI.
We just don't have the knowledge to utilize such resources to write an AI that could, for exampe, play League of Legends or Starcraft at a level beyond professional gamers. And it certainly couldn't write a best selling novel. It could solve an arbitrarily large traveling salesman problem but it couldn't do those other things. I think that's kind of awesome.
I'm not saying it can't be done. Assuming we humans don't kill ourselves I think someday it will. But it's a long, long ways off.
AI is a software problem as well as a hardware problem. It's ridiculous to assume we understand the underlying model of the function of the human brain in general. We don't even understand the physics of it all yet. Be optimistic about AI, but don't be fooled -- it's not as basic as hooking up transistors and thinking they behave like neurons.
Theoretically maaku is right. With infinite RAM and CPU you would just have to execute every random string of bytes until one of them happens to be strong AI. Of course, there's probably less than 1% chance of it being friendly...
Optimization power, possibly divided by available resources.
In a game of Chess, only a narrow set of moves will let me steer the future into a winning state. Well, the same is true for the Game of Life (the real one, not Conway's): we humans are intelligent because we're able to steer the future through probability to a-priori incredibly unlikely outcomes. Compare walking vs moving your limbs randomly.
It was a rhetorical question. The point was once you have a definition of intelligence - yours is one of many fine definitions - you can refine that into a metric for comparing different intelligences, and then you have a way for a comparison function given two program descriptions to determine which is "more intelligent".
Building artificial intelligence then reduces to undirected search, assuming infinite CPU and RAM.
And what do you do after evolving it? We might have less luck dissecting it and figuring out how it works than we do with human brains. It would be a total black box. And the end product is highly adapted for the specific fitness function used to evaluate it and probably wouldn't be good on anything else.
Ah, but we weren't given infinite time also, so you might be able to evolve an AI, but it might take many millions of years (like it did with real life).
He said infinite CPU power which implies infinite number of iterations. In real life it would probably take a lot more than millions of years (because computers are too slow to simulate populations of millions of minds.)
Does infinite energy (as infinite CPU cycles) really translate into immediate time? My physics isn't great, but I thought energy was related to mass, while entropy was related to time.
Fortunately, with infinite processing and storage, time is irrelevant. :)
Flip the switch and you'll have real intelligence (as opposed to our lazy Approximate Intelligence) just in time for the immediate heat death of the universe.
Did he just say you give us infinite CPU power? Why not bruteforce it then? Starting from the number 1 to number 2^800000000 for each program it generates by that number test the program[automated test] to see if it is intelligent. If intelligent then tell it produce a book.
Not really. Just pick your favorite AI problem and see how well it does on that. Pick a bunch of AI problems and see how well it does on all of them. Weight the algorithms by simplicity if you are worried about it over-fitting.
With this hypothetical infinite speed computer you will get solutions that are perfect matches for your test cases but essentially random for all other inputs.
Exactly. Saying that with infinite CPU power you could brute-force a solution is like saying the Library of Babel[1] contains every book ever written. True, in a sense, but not as useful as you might think.
I really don't see what's so controversial about this. The universe can, as far as our understanding of physics dictates, be simulated in finite computational time. This experiment dictates infinite computational time.
Evolution is a purely physical process. Make up a series of tests more or equally complex to those evolution present, and you'll end up with intelligence - unless there happens to be something very, very special about human intelligence as opposed to other forms of intelligence. Humans are currently a local maximum in the space of intelligences which have been explored by evolution.
That's not a brute force approach, and would be a difficult engineering task all on its own, regardless of the infinite computational resources available.
"Pick a bunch of AI problems and see how well it does on all of them."
The problem is, you have infinite potential algorithms and a finite number of tests. This means you'll necessarily get algorithms that pass all your tests but fail at least one other test of intelligence. Because of this, your tests won't actually let you discover which of the generated algorithms is intelligent.
Or, you could have an infinite number of tests, but if you have infinite tests for intelligence, you effectively already have an algorithm for intelligence (for any problem, just look up the answer in your list of tests), so, again, brute-forcing a solution isn't helpful.
Infinite CPU seriously? I think if we had even a couple of orders of magnitude compute power we can have strong AI within a few years. It's not a hard problem at all. The limiting thing is compute power (and data to compute with).
We just don't have the knowledge to utilize such resources to write an AI that could, for exampe, play League of Legends or Starcraft at a level beyond professional gamers. And it certainly couldn't write a best selling novel. It could solve an arbitrarily large traveling salesman problem but it couldn't do those other things. I think that's kind of awesome.
I'm not saying it can't be done. Assuming we humans don't kill ourselves I think someday it will. But it's a long, long ways off.