Honestly this really pisses me off

Of course, but if you simply ignore them and walk away, you can't communicate the inordinate amount of disgust you have for them at that moment.

You obviously aren't a programmer.

Computers have no intelligence. They do what you program them to do.

also, I wasn't aware that tab didn't target nearest enemy either... newb learns something new every day.

So target nearest enemy would be ctrl+tab then?

Yep.

The problem is that the former definition actually fits things easily demonstrable to lack intelligence of any sort. Like a door lock. You rotate a key which "instructs" the lock to lock or unlock. Not intelligent, but it carries out orders on command. And we shouldn't really make a difference between electronic "orders" and mechanical orders, as mechanical computers have also existed. Electronic commands are no more "commands" merely because systems that use them are more complicated or because they require less energy to actuate them. Mechanical actuators exist to do the same thing.

Basically speaking, "operating by design" is not intelligence, not in any definition of the word I can accept. Intelligence requires an intelligent response. A pre-defined response is not intelligent. It may be appropriate, but it is not a decision, not any more so than any inanimate object reacting to physical law. Only when you have an actual, intelligent decision, or a decent emulation of such, can you actually have intelligence. People who are very good at doing what they are told do not do so because they're brainlessly following instructions. They are good at following orders because they are good at interpreting instructions, working out the INTENT behind these instructions, and then carrying them out to the satisfaction of the commanding figure.

A computer can only emulate intelligence if it is given sufficient situational awareness, which very, very few programmes are actually capable of. An AI within a game is, in fact, very rarely aware of even its OWN environment, and that requires no environment perception at all, since everything is virtual and already within the system's memory. Look at basic pathfinding within the game, and how often a pet will get stuck on a railing, running into it an unable to jump. I can see this, you can see this, and the computer can CLEARLY see this because both the environment, the pet's location and the pet's instructions are already within memory. But the AI is not able to comprehend the information and realise that there is a railing in the way and jumping over it the intelligent solution. Because the AI is not thinking of a larger picture, but rather an iterative process of consecutive steps, it cannot understand that you just want it to get from point A to point B, and it's not necessary for it to do it via those exact instructions and could go around if need be.

Something is intelligent if it only needs to be told WHAT it needs to do in order for it to do it, without necessarily having to be told HOW to do it. In predictable circumstances, the "how" is easy to just program in a static way. However, in dynamic, unpredictable and, above all, indescribably circumstances, this is non-trivial, and actually sets the limits on artificial intelligence. Humans are perfectly capable of functioning on unclear, ambiguous orders, in an environment full of unknown variables, using limited, incomplete and often misleading perception of their environment with often unreliable interpretation of this perception. Yet we manage to get through this mess just fine. Computers, at least current-generation computers, cannot. Not unless they are led around like little children or restricted to only very specific, controlled situations. We are intelligent enough to operate basically on our own, and we do pretty well for our limitations. Computers are not.

Basically, a computer is wholly incapable of intelligent action unless it is being controlled by an intelligent person or operating with very limited application.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I dunno, I'm pretty sure I would define that as the exact opposite of intelligence. Mindless obedience is mindless, as the young people say on the Internet nowadays.

ZOMGDEFCON1!!!

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Samuel, that was really long winded.

Try this:

A program is created to perform a task/s. That task/s is designed by a programmer. A computer does not have intelligence as it can not opperate outside the scope of its program.

Welcome to my world

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Think of it this way: if you find a person that can multiply together two huge numbers in his head in less than a second without ever being wrong, you would probably consider the person to be rather intelligent. That's the entire issue with savantism and idiot savantism: they're incredibly intelligent in some ways without what we often consider to be the other hallmarks of intelligence. It's a mindless function, but it's being performed with incredible accuracy and speed. Intelligence isn't just measured in complexity of thought. It's also measured in the speed of thought.

Actually, I am a programmer. And, because I'm a programmer, I know that whatever the computer does wrong, it didn't do it wrong because of its own faults. It did it incorrectly specifically because I told it to do the wrong thing. It did exactly what I told it to do. When it ends up doing something that I didn't want it to do, that's not a lack of intelligence on the part of the computer. That's a lack of intelligence on the part of the programmer.

Er, no, I would consider him quite good at math. Charles Babbage was "rather intelligent". His difference engine, as constructed at the British Museum of Science, isn't. It's just a pile of cunningly arranged metal bits.

Can you?

The irony is that it proves a person following instructions has no intelligence.

The strawman aspect of that argument has always been that the "lack of understanding" of Chinese is predicated on the belief that the instructions the person is executing are trivially simple. It masks the actual metaphysical problem with discussions of intelligence (and consciousness, which is not the same thing). And that is at what point does mechanics generate intelligence. After all, none of your brain's neurons are individually intelligent. They each function in a predictable way that a machine could emulate. Intelligence is an emergent property of the collection of those neurons. Looking at the Chinese room from a different point of view, if the person in the room was given so complex a set of instructions that the Chinese room could pass the Turing test, who's to say that while the *person* wasn't acting with intelligence or understanding, the room was.

In other words, it relies on bias to make the listener leap to the conclusion "obviously rooms can't be intelligent: either the person in the room is, or nothing is." But that's no different from saying "either a neuron is intelligent, or its not: certainly a white rock with eyes that holds a bunch of them can't be intelligent."

No. The concept has nothing to do with the room being intelligent or not. The person is the thing being considered here. The person does not understand chinese and will not understand it, no matter how simple or complex the rules are.

It does not prove the person is unintelligent, just that they do not understand Chinese.

The argument is designed to illustrate the difference between simple mechanical interaction and the human concept of understanding as a form of intelligence. I would certainly not think the Chinese Room argument is a strawman.

The question of 'what is the bridge between neurons and understanding?' is a vital question to our existence, and one we haven't figured out yet.

By an eerie coincidence, this is how babelfish.yahoo.com works. And you thought it was computers!

I've been having debates surrounding the Chinese Room for over twenty years. It has almost *always* been used, at least outside hypothetical discussions of cognition, to act as a foil to the Turing Test conjecture. The Turing Test conjecture states (essentially) that anything that can pretend to be intelligent to a human being is intelligent. The Chinese Room attempts to argue that a person that doesn't understand Chinese can nevertheless theoretically pass the Turing Test in Chinese without any comprehension of Chinese. Since the person obviously doesn't have any understanding of what he's doing, it suggests that there's no reason to conclude that a computer that passes the Turing Test necessarily does either.

But that's a strawman for the reason I mention above. Put simply, it focuses on the *person* but the person can't pass the Chinese Turing Test. The room does.

In effect, we considered the computer (the human) without its programming (the book) and said that because a component was provably unintelligent (within the context of the test) the entire system was. That's no different - no different - than saying that since individual neurons aren't intelligent, a bag of them isn't either.

Why can't a human plus a book be intelligent - within the context of the hypothetical - even if neither in isolation is? Its human bias that makes that seem obvious, because it plays on our belief that if a human isn't considered intelligent within the context of the test, no system with the human in it is either.

Searle (the original author of the Chinese Room) himself had this objection to the contention that the room + the human + the book as a system was a mind. He suggests that if the human memorized the book and left the room, the system would be reduced to just a person, and since we already established that the person doesn't understand Chinese, the fact that the "system" can is meaningless, since the system *is* just the person.

Wrong. Just because the person memorized the book, doesn't mean anything. What mattered wasn't the physicality of the book, but its instructional content. Memorizing those instructions didn't destroy them, any more than converting the instructions on a paper card into electrons destroys them. The system is still Human + "Instructions that used to be in the book" which the person is processing. Its really no different than the human tatooing the instructions all over his body, Memento-style. Tatooing on the skin, or memorizing in your brain, has no distinction within the context of the Chinese Room.

One of the problems Searle has is he fails to delve into the nature of simulation verses reality. He dismisses simulations as "not being real" which is technically true, but fails to examine *why* simulations aren't real, which is a question of relativity. But that's a very, very long discussion.

I am not a program.

It doesn't befit you to resort to malicious arguments, Arcana, especially since you've shown you can do better.

A person can very much work beyond his or her "original programming," as basic development already shows. A person can be taught, a person can learn by himself, and a person can plain figure things out via trial and error. And in a much deeper way than just pure reason. We're built with systems specifically designed to handle the unknown, which gather useful information and give us an instinct even if we don't recognise it.

That's not to say computers can't emulate the same thing, and learning computers have been in development for some time. But that's another thing entirely. A computer which learns and is able to apply its knowledge to an unknown situation IS intelligent, if such a thing even exists. But a computer that only reacts based on pre-defined situations and reactions to them is not. It is a machine, nothing more. A complicated system of pushing a button to initiate an effect.

I'm not of the opinion that any system which can fake intelligence can be considered intelligent. For one thing, humans are idiots and some can believe anything is intelligent. After all, how many people are completely convinced their toaster is talking to them? For another thing, humans are idiots, and even ANOTHER PERSON can't always manage to come across as intelligent, much less a machine. What "seems" intelligent is an inherently flawed test, because it's subjective and because we're predisposed to see faces, patterns, reason and intelligence in places where it doesn't exist. Gods weren't invented for fun, they were invented because people were SURE there was some kind of intelligence behind the sun and sky and the health of their crops.

Intelligent computers are possible, but as far as I'm aware, they don't exist yet. Some headway has been made into some of those fields, but results are still limited and impractical. Intelligence, in the practical sense, is not the same as automation. If anything, automation is the OPPOSITE of intelligence.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I don't measure intelligence by speed. I measure speed by FLOPS

Or because the person who wrote the library you're using coded it wrong. Or because the person who created the interpreter did it wrong. Or because the person who created the compiler did it wrong. Or because the person who created the lexer it it wrong. Or because the person who created the hardware did it wrong. Or because there was a mechanical malfunction (such as a disruption of electricity). Or because cosmic rays caused your client computer to mutate into an elephant.

Prove it

Prove that I am. C'mon now... asking me to disprove anything that you can't prove is a bad foundation for any argument.

For one i'm conscious. two I have an imagination. I am not exercising a pre-programed directive as I type this. This is learned.

And since you have no definition of what a program is the argument falls to my own definition. I can prove that I am not a program till i am blue in the face and I won't be wrong.

Anyway, I've never cared for philosophical debates. My philosophy teacher hated me. Why i became a Computer Science major.

First off, you can't prove self-awareness so simply saying that you are conscious doesn't really mean much (especially since I could write up a program that simply outputs that exact response), especially since it's pretty easy to simply tell something to act in a certain way to emulate self-awareness.

Secondly, a number of psychological schools would actually argue that you are following through on biologically and socially programmed directives. How do you quantify the difference between "learning" and "manipulating information within a database"? There isn't any except that one occurs in a living creature and the other occurs in a computer.

You seem to think it's difficult to prove self-awareness. I think that I am self-aware therefore I am.

Write a program that Reasons and can come to the conclusion that It is self-aware without preprogramming this into it. Then you might have a foot to stand on. Have to warn you though, General Intelligence has never been perfected.

Emulation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Looks like I got my red wing back. Someone doesn't like being wrong.