bwoj
Joined 13 years ago
Joined 13 years ago
On the level where the learning is done and knowledge is represented in these networks there is no evidence anyone really understands how it works.
I suspect maybe at that level you can think of it as an algorithm with unreliable outputs. I don’t know what that idea gains over thinking it’s not algorithmic and just a heuristic approximation.
The desirable property of formal systems is that the results they produce are proven in a way that can be independently verified. Many informal systems can produce correct results to problems without a known, efficient algorithmic solution. Lots of scheduling and packing problems are NP-complete but that doesn’t stop us from delivering heuristic based solutions that work good enough.
Edit: I should probably add that I’m pretty rusty on this. Godels theorem tells ua that if a formal system is consistent, it will be incomplete. That is, there will be true statements that cannot be proven in the system. If the system is complete, that is, all true/false statements can be proven, then the system will be incomplete. That is you can prove contradictory things in the system.
AI we have now isn’t really either of these. It’s not working to derive truth and falsehood from axioms and a rule system. It’s just approximating the most likely answers that match its training data.
All of this has almost no relation to the questions we’re interested in like how intelligent can AI be or can it attain consciousness. I don’t even know that we have definitions for these concepts suitable for beginning a scientific inquiry.
Other aspects of ANN that show that Gödel doesn’t apply is that they are not formal systems. Formal system is a collection of defined operations. The building blocks of ANN could perhaps be built into a formal system. Petri nets have been demonstrated to be computationally equivalent to Turing machines. But this is really an indictment on the implementation. It’s the same as using your PC, implementing a formal system like its instruction set to run a heuristic computation. Formal system can implement informal systems.
I don’t think you have to look at humans very hard to see that humans don’t implement any kind of formal system and are not equivalent to Turing machines.