Chess is the Drosophila of Reasoning

Much as the Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly became a model organism for geneticists, chess became a Drosophila of reasoning. In the late 19th century, Alfred Binet hoped that understanding why certain people excelled at chess would unlock secrets of human thought. Sixty years later, Alan Turing wondered if a chess-playing machine might illuminate, in the words of Norbert Wiener, “whether this sort of ability represents an essential difference between the potentialities of the machine and th...

 New Kind of Memory for AI

AI researchers have typically tried to get around the issues posed by by Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall! by instructing reinforcement-learning algorithms to explore randomly at times, while adding rewards for exploration—what’s known as “intrinsic motivation.” But the Uber researchers believe this fails to capture an important aspect of human curiosity. “We hypothesize that a major weakness of current intrinsic motivation algorithms is detachment,” they write. “Wherein the algorithms forget...

 Turing's Two Great Insights

Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer, began by thinking about the highly conscious and deliberate step-by-step calculations performed by human “computers” like the women decoding German ciphers at Bletchley Park. His first great insight was that the same processes could be instantiated in an entirely unconscious machine, with the same results. A machine could rationally decode the German ciphers using the same steps that the conscious “computers” went through. And the unconscious re...

 How Do You Find Emergent Intelligence on the Internet?

How would we know if there was an autonomous conscious superorganism? We would need a Turing Test for a global AI. But the Turing Test is flawed for this search because it is meant to detect human-like intelligence, and if a consciousness emerged at the scale of a global megacomputer, its intelligence would unlikely to be anything human-like. We might need to turn to SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), for guidance. By definition, it is a test for non-human intelligence...