Artificial Intelligence: Solving the Chinese Room Argument

[This article was first published on Graph of the Week, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Yesterday, the very best AI (artificial intelligence) had trouble beating a novice human chess player. Today, the very best human player has enormous difficulty beating the best AI. Tomorrow, the very best human player will never beat any AI. However, that’s not the worst news you’ve heard. This is:
Computers have no idea how to play chess whatsoever.
They also don’t understand Chinese, but that doesn’t stop them from trouncing us in chess or speaking Chinese. Let’s find out how this is possible and speculate on whether or not we can actually create an AI capable of true understanding.

Yesterday: Pong

Mankind has been dreaming of AI since antiquity, so the idea is not new. Ancient Greek mythology, for example, tells of a giant bronze robot named Talos whose task it was to patrol the shores of Crete, protecting the inhabitants from invaders. In the Far East, circa 3rd century BC, the Chinese ‘Lie Ze’ text gives an account of mechanical men being given to King Mu of Zhou. Evidently, these automations were so lifelike that the king had some torn apart to ensure they were, in fact, artificial. The point is, the idea of thinking machines has been around for millennia.
This article was written by Patrick Rhodes and published on January 12, 2016. Click here to read the rest of the article.

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Graph of the Week.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)