Comment by moxiemk1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moxiemk1 | Hacker News Reader

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>> Google does not really understand language

I used to believe, like you do, that the ability to parse and make decisions based on input was not the same thing as understanding.

Then, I wrote a chess bot for a CS lab. The thing plays better than me, better than it's peers. My partner, who was good at chess (or at least very literate in it) could identify what strategies it was going for. We had a visualization of what moves it was considering, and you could see that it was essentially playing chess by swinging a baseball bat around and seeing what looked nice.

Does the chessbot "understand" chess? It sure seems like it. We like to think humans are special, and have some kind of unique understanding that computers can't, but I think it's only us lying to ourselves.

I dunno, for me "understanding" something implies an ability to reason about your reasoning. a rule-based AI can't do that, and even if interesting patterns emerge, it's still deterministic.

This point crosses into the realm of metaphysics and philosophy because it's entirely possible that more than just google's AI is deterministic. Besides, as input for the AI they are using the behavior of the millions of google users. Its likely as deterministic as you or I.

In a way, when a chess master thinks about a position, they can see many many moves ahead, in an innate feeling kind of way about what is a good and bad position. I think you could say that a human is better at aggressive pruning using better common sense whereas a computer can be just as good, it has to examine the billion or more positions though.

Nice point, but that was not what I was getting at. The chess bot can see the whole chess field and "knows" how the pieces moves. The difference with google, is that google does not see the meanings of the words (or the entities that the words refer to), just the words. I don't mean to say that humans are special when it comes to language, just that humans have a lot of information (world knowledge) about words that google cannot pick up just by looking at the words themselves. If we manage to capture that information, then I think a computer can also understand language.

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