Scarabin

Have edited my OP to better reflect what I meant to say. Not exactly a triumph of wit?

We all know that brevity is the very soul of wit. I think wit can also be sharp, even cruel. It has to surprise,perhaps shock. It almost certainly has to be spontaneous. The French have a phrase "the wisdom of the staircase": this means the witty remark you only think of as you descend the staircase after your meeting/conversation has ended. I know of two possible approaches. The first,which I call the Bob Hope approach is to have an armoury of witty sayings and trot these out on suitable(?) occasions. I was once quite shocked to hear him tell the archbishop of Dublin to "Vamoose peasant". My own approach is much more dangerous and involves blurting out involuntary remarks with no prior consideration. In fact I don't even know what I am going to say. Example, many years ago I attended a discussion of new tax laws which would relieve Australian life assurance companies of all taxes,income & capital gains. At the end of the discussion I heard myself saying "Oh well, there's only two things certain in this life: death and taxes". For a horrible moment I wondered if I'd said something truly half-witted but luckily my colleagues started to laugh. Perhaps this means inappropriate statements can pass as wit. One of our past Prime Ministers was my role model for wit. In an interview he got away with the priceless "No,no, I did not say I was a good prime minister, I only said I was the best prime minister, Australia ever had." He could have prepared this in advance but he was consistently witty Have you any anecdotes or views to share?

I think Mike777 makes a valid point when he suggests defining what "computers matching human intelligence" means before estimating when it may be achieved, and that's what I am trying to do. After all, if we lower the bar too much then it has already been accomplished, if we raise it too high then it never will. That said I am not sure there is much point in predicting computer progress in a vacuum. There must even be a significant chance PC development will stagnate while attention is diverted to mobile phones,etc. Like the reference to the "We think we know but do we" concept, but puzzled by Ken's "somewhat semantic", a bit like saying we communicate in prose? Returning to Barmar's "It doesn't matter how a device achieves a goal so long as it achieves it", I think the "how" makes a huge difference. Many years ago the Rand Corporation were hired to determine the best way to deliver an atomic device to its target. They considered many factors: cost, speed, reliability being the most obvious. Enough said?

Mine is a purely personal view and limited to game AI, but I honestly do not think the distinction between brute force and human intelligence is a false distinction. Let me try to make my point with two examples. 1) We could write a bridge simulation based on double dummy bidding and play, and overlay this with a pragmatic rule-based interface. Where a rule existed the simulation would follow the rule and where no rule existed it would fall back on double-dummy bidding and play. I venture to suggest this would give a very high level of simulation, virtually indistinguishable from expert play, and yet I do not think you would argue that it matched or exceeded human intelligence? 2) Similarly Scrabble playing simulations exist which are based on searching a built-in dictionary and performing anagrams. Apart from possible time constraints this would outplay any human competitor, and it is pure brute force or if you prefer machine intelligence so I guess you might say its AI matches or exceeds human intelligence? I would not agree, because human intelligence goes far beyond this (a point which I think you made previously). The program might well explain the meaning of words better than I could but it would not be able to form those words into intelligible sentences.

I really enjoyed the various "Age of Empires" right up to No 4. The computer AI seemed to have several advantages: extra resources, better management of several tasks at once, and sometimes impossible goals for the hiuman player. I did realise it had a relatively simple standard strategy I also enjoyed the Gettysburg,Waterloo - Austerlitz series, and even tried to mod these. Eventually I discovered I was more interested in AI than in graphics and decided to go back to my first-love, bridge simulation. As regards your first point, I accept this but think human and machine artefacts are significantly different.

Thanks for prompt reply and link. I have read transcript which compensates for missing talk. I guess I got the time out by an hour and tried to join just after the session ended. My fault, apologies and thanks.

Tried but could not find or access Fred's chat. Perhaps I just got the time wrong but apart from that possibility can anyone help, please? :unsure:

:unsure: My knowledge of AI is totally amateur, unschooled and pretty basic. I first discovered AI while trying to defeat it in the old Cinemaware classic "Lords of the Rising Sun" written for the Amiga. Having got that disclaimer off my chest, may I make 2 points. I think we should distinguish between brute force and AI, and I think AI can have 3 elements: brute force, human intelligence replication, and illusion. Brute force is machine intelligence: the things machines do better than humans, like math calculations, and which humans usually try to replicate with shortcuts. This may be very impressive but to my mind is not real intelligence. An example of this is a computer simulation of Scrabble, which any existing computer should be able to play to perfection. Human intelligence replication is the process whereby a computer tries to reproduce human reasoning. To some extent, Monte Carlo simulates this based on using frequencies to supply a priori probabilities, but because it's an approximation, in practise its success is flawed by inexplicable artefacts and inadequate sampling. The only possible attempts to actually attack this are all programs which I have been unable to obtain: examples are Fred's Base lll, Ian Frank's Finesse, which both seem to be abandoned. Illusion ranges from cheating,double dummy play or hidden advantages to your opponent, to rituals which give the illusion of intentional movement. Examples of the latter abound in "Age of Empires". :unsure:

Been reading up on robot swarm technology but it does not seem to add to AI, rather a reversion to mindless robot behaviour using evasion technology.

I guess that unless you have been the victim of violence (such as a "Glasgow kiss") you cannot envisage the paranoia of living in a country prone to home invasions. I suggest however it would be responsible to check the background before making merry little quips about real people.

Sorry for the poor joke but 2 revokes are definitely bad! How was the MP result? Would like to see the East-West hands - I am still plugging away at my program and presently working on reconstructing the hidden hands. Thanks for the topic I really enjoyed it.

Only if this is the exact layout. Give East one more spade and have West lead the ace of clubs. I think the slam is too fragile and the penalty more robust. But to go for slam I need to know North has a club control, preferably void.

I pass the double, and this also applies if I had bid 4♠. I see the hands as something like this (although I'll probably look stupid when you show the actual hands), J & under should be "x's" : [hv=pc=n&s=sk876543hdckt9765&w=s2h32dakq32caq432&n=saq9hakq654d654c8&e=sjthjt987djt987cj]399|300[/hv]

I think the question then becomes: what do you bid over 5♦? Sorry this crossed with Antrax's post.

If I bid 2♠,my second choice, then I repeat ♠at minimum level and suppress clubs,unless partner comes to life in a big way. ♣seem to be our weakness. Probably partner has ♠A and West top ♦& ♣.

I am only interested in 2 things: how many clubs does partner hold & who has the ♠A & ♣A? Would partner cue-bid the ♣A if I had jumped to 3♠? I want to buy the contract and am happy to play 4♠. I just dont want to miss a slam. Of course I'll be happy to double clubs at any level. My guess: West is 5-4 in minors, North 5-3-3-2. Aces & queens in spades & clubs are the only important cards. Over 3NT I'll bid 4♣, over 4♦ 5♣, anything else 4♠.

I don't know your partner or your system but I would bid 3♦,asking partner for a further feature (hopefully clubs). Second choice would be 2♠, hoping to buy the contract at the lowest possible level.

Sorry, your posts are just too cryptic for me and I really don't know what you want to say. At a guess you may merely be saying that there is no point in prolonging the discussion if we cannot agree a definition of intelligence and a means of measuring it. If this is indeed what you are saying then I agree completely. So ave atque vale.

I'll try to answer your points in order: 1) I'll have to leave this one to you. When I search for a means of measurement I keep going back to Turing's "indistinguishable from human intelligence", and that didn't work out well. 2) Not sure I will be around to do this. 3)Noted 4)At present yes. 5)Agreed 6)Noted 7) Agreed As regards how long, fear very long to never! Sorry this isn't more helpful.

You're probably doing better than me: I breezed through A levels 1 to 3 and only encountered difficulty at level 4 (at least that's how I remember it) but my intelligence seems to be shrinking since I have difficulties with level 3 on the later refill deals. I'm clinging to the memory that Inquiry said something about an A4 deal which I mentioned in a "State of the art" topic would only have been level 3 in the later refills!

I think I agree with Barmar's analysis, #46 & #48, although I probably disagree on minor points. The devil is in the details. For instance, I am not sure if Barmar implies That we "move the bar" through vanity or if posts #52 & #52 introduced this idea. In either case I think we do this because we find our previous criterion no longer valid. My previous two points really boil down to requiring a computer to be able to think like a human being, and this has to be perceptual, qualitative rather than quantitative. Let me try to clarify my thinking with a trivial example: Suppose I adopt the test that a computer must be capable of learning, and someone writes a simple simulation of tossing a coin and the computer reports the probability of "heads" as 47% based on the frequency of ocurrence in a sample. Now the author comes to me and says his computer is deriving and learning probabilities just like a human. I counter that the computer has not done anything not included in the original program, and that I would have been more impressed if it had commented on the futility of the experiment or had shown some "human" understanding of the results. Lo and behold, he goes away and builds in a range of statements to do just that. Take another example, Bridgemaster: now Bridgemaster replicates human thought on a single particular problem. If it could do this for any and every bridge problem, I would accept computers had come close to intelligent.

I don't think I can suggest an adequate way of measuring my proposed tests. The trouble is that once a standard is set someone will program a computer to meet it even though the program may be "unintelligent". I think Turing changed his original test to make it measurable. I fear I can only say I can recognize intelligence but not define it.

Hey, let's keep our priorities right! What Beidgemaster needs is more deals, please. :angry: On the other hand it would be nice to have more flexibility in loading refill deals: perhaps to be able to load all A to D instead of just A plus 1 other, or to load all deals at a level, or all deals of a type. Otherwise Bridgemaster is perfect as it is :D

Sorry, could not resist the opportunity. Glad we can blame Ken for hijacking the "irony" thread and not me! :D

The "technological singularity" may already be upon us: Barmar transferred the robot posts to this topic but the software left behind my post #180 which first highjacked the "irony" thread and transferred P_Marlowe #31 which threatens to morph this thread. I do not know if this is an example of robot whimsy or value judgment but perhaps we should start a thread on:"Are robots in favour of censorship?" while we still can? More seriously I do not see any evidence to suggest that computers will develop real intelligence this side of infinity. As for measures of intelligence: Turing suggested imitation of humans but programs like Eliza fulfilled this with gullible subjects and without requiring any real intelligence. I would put forward two possible tests (1) demonstration of spontaneous learning and(2) a capacity for original thought. In practice I think the pursuit of abstract computer intelligence is a bit of a red herring outside the groves of academe, what is important, in the real world, is how well computers perform the tasks they are programmed to do. That is enough for me, and for Blofeld to take over the world with the aid of drones!