"I find both of your comments extremely condescending"
When a comment opens with a tone like this, I usually don't bother to respond, but I'll give you a chance, because you seem to have done a lot of honest mis-reading.
To wit, it may be of value for you to inspect your own tone, if you find public condescention inappropriate.
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"1. The fact that Claude Shannon succeeded in training a chess system has virtually no impact on sallweachter's claim that many AI results were overstated."
It wasn't meant to. Sallweatcher's claim was silly. Who cares if many things were overstated? That has zero bearing on that valid work was, in fact, being done.
The purpose of that statement was to remind us that as early as the 1940s, machine learning was able to defeat its own creator at what remains today regarded as a highly intellectual pursuit. My goal was to ignore the FUD of "some people got it wrong" as an attempt to suggest that there was nothing right.
Some people always get some of everything wrong. His claim is tautological and disinteresting. I was politely declining to shame him for it, but since you've presented me as having false goals, I now have no choice but to clarify.
It is generally inappropriate, for reasons like these, to chastize strangers over imagined motivations. Frequently, you don't know strangers' motivations as well as you might imagine from a simple read of a few paragraphs.
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"2. Certainly the press overstated them, which supports saalweachter's premise"
You are now repeating something I said to me back to me. From that, you are deriving the false conclusion that because a journalist somewhere said something wrong, an important thing has been discovered.
What I'd like to point out is that the net result of observing that journalists made mistakes is still "so what?"
"Even if the _implied_ claim was that _researchers_ overstated results"
It isn't.
"your argument does nothing to weaken this claim."
You have not correctly identified what I was speaking to. This is akin to telling someone discussing environmental damage that some farmer is talking about crop yield and the speaker hasn't weakened their claim.
Again: so what? I never argued that there are journalists who got things wrong. I'm the one who brought it up.
What does that have to do with my original discussion?
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"Frito Lay solved a problem several orders of magnitude easier that of face recognition in natural images"
Discovering defects in potatoes moving at 45 miles an hour inside a water sluice from a single blurry image from a single angle in hard realtime using 1970s hardware is not several orders of magnitude easier than locating things on a face in slow time on modern hardware.
It's actually quite a bit more difficult even in fair conditions. Potato defects are under the surface, and have to be located by subtle color variation. It is not hard to find the characteristic shape and shadow of the nose.
With respect, sir, it's quite clear that this is not something you've done. You're claiming that easy things are more difficult than hard things, and you're forgetting the 40 year technology gap inbetween in your rush to show that a 2012 project is more impressive than a 1973 project.
To be clear, Babbage's mechanical calculator is also more impressive than an algebra solving system made in prolog. Why? Because it's more work and it's more difficult.
Your claim of several orders of magnitude simpler suggests that you are inventing data for the sake of feeling correct in an argument, and that you do not actually have the experience to show correct guesses in this field. That, combined with a tone suggesting that you feel it appropriate to rebuke strangers in public, suggests that I don't really want to much talk to you anymore.
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"Frito Lay example contributes nothing to your goal of weakening saalweachter's claim that this is valuable research"
Again, you've misidentified my goal, and the way by which you've done that is to drop a critical piece of his actual claim.
I don't know why you feel that it's okay to guess at people's goals, then tell people how morally wrong your guesses are. I really don't.
My actual goal was to point out the jarring unfamiliarity with the field that both he and you evidence:
"It's extremely valuable for someone to actually go and do a thing, now that we can, even if someone had the idea for the thing eons ago"
The thing I was focussing on was to show him that this thing that he's applauding someone for doing in 2012 for the first time now that it's practical, even though it isn't being used in industry, was actually outclassed by a much more difficult problem on much more limited hardware in realtime 40 years ago by a company that nobody would think of as a technology giant.
The goal was to display just how far out of touch saalweatcher was with the state of the industry.
Please don't speak to my goals anymore. For someone who'd like to speak about condescention (when I think you actually mean arrogance,) for you to tell me what I meant and what I was getting at - incorrectly - then lambast me for it in a tone far more severe than that which you're criticizing is, I admit, difficult to swallow politely.
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"I'm sure your father (respected AI researcher of the same name) would make them too"
Do not speak for, or involve, my recently deceased father in your attempt to be correct, sir. Especially not while you're telling someone else they're being rude.
"I would a less condescending one that made better use of evidence than the argument you've made here."
Unfortunately, though you suggest this, taking a brief look through your comment shows that this is not in fact correct. You have been radically uglier than that which you are criticizing, involving personal attacks, false claims of other people's intent, false claims of other people's goals, and the repeat involvement of a recently deceased relative.
I would prefer not to hear from you again. Thanks.