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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31254 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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What examples did you find of it behaving unintelligently? I think they just programmed it to be verbose after so many episodes of people asking it to elaborate in the previous configuration. I agree that it just doesn't know when to shut up.

For example:

What five letter word may precede the words 'slate' 'verse' and 'look'?

The word you are thinking of is "clean." It can be used to describe the act of wiping a slate clean, or to describe a verse in a song as "clean" or free of explicit language. It can also be used to describe someone's appearance or behavior as "clean," as in "He has a clean look about him."

Now the better answer would've been 'blank', since clean verse isn't really a thing. But clean is pretty good. I think clean verse could be a thing. That's a fairly intelligent answer.

It's pretty good at maths too:

written as a function of y what is the inverse of the function y equals x plus one all raised to the power three?

The inverse of a function y = f(x) is a function x = f^-1(y) such that f(f^-1(y)) = y = I(y) where I(y) is the identity function.

To find the inverse of the function y = (x + 1)^3 , we will follow these steps:

Switch x and y in the original function: x = (y + 1)^3

Solve for y in terms of x: y = (x^(1/3)) - 1

Replace x with y in the inverse function: y = f^-1(y) = (y^(1/3)) - 1

So the inverse function of y = (x + 1)^3 is y = f^-1(y) = (y^(1/3)) - 1.

It also got this question right:

For a cube, what number is obtained by adding the number of vertices to the number of faces and subtracting the number of edges of that cube.

I think it's generally intelligent, only with a few weird weaknesses like perfect numbers and a couple of other things I jotted down, it got confused at the wording of some more complicated questions.

Now the better answer would've been 'blank', since clean verse isn't really a thing. But clean is pretty good. I think clean verse could be a thing. That's a fairly intelligent answer.

No, it isn't.

People tend to interpret this kind of thing as if it was produced by an intelligent creature. After all, it's in proper grammar, and is phrased in a way that seems to resemble thoughts. It's hard to think of it as just being a text processor.

But it is. You shouldn't be making charitable interpretations of errors made by machines. "Clean verse" in this context is a mistake. It doesn't become not-a-mistake by saying "well, it's pretty good even though it's clearly the wrong answer". If a human said that, you'd probably say "oh, he was thinking of 'blank verse'", but the computer isn't a human, and wasn't thinking of anything; it shouldn't get partial credit for that.

But it literally justified 'clean verse' as verse that didn't have profanity in it. There's a clear relationship with meaning, it created a plausible phrase. If someone used the phrase 'clean verse' in context, it's unobjectionable and the meaning comes through.

If the machine said 'Australopithecus verse' or 'sabot-discarding verse' or 'rhinocerous verse' then I'd have a serious problem with it. It's not clearly a wrong answer if I had to check that it's not a real term. Maths questions in exams are graded on how many parts of the question you get right. Even if you get a wrong answer as long as part of your working is right you can still get some marks. I would give the machine 2/3 for its answer, it's a good attempt.

Now, the University Challenge format doesn't give half-marks, you're either right or wrong. Even so, there's being wrong and being spectacularly wrong. At one point they had an appallingly bad set of human teams. They made catastrophic, ridiculous errors.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=VLD3MtSXv5s?list=PLkjGBrjEcmjUBZSXKv5eCCrdlhP5WcRTR&t=433

In 1936 which mathematician conceived an eponymous model of an abstract general computer that manipulates symbols on an infinite strip of tape

IBM! They answer IBM! IBM is certainly not the correct answer, it's not even a mathematician. If that answer came from a machine you'd surely call it fundamentally flawed and inhumanly stupid, yet it came from a team of four (highly credentialed) people. Quality of thought should be graded on results, not on the kind of processing machinery that's used to produce it.

If you're grading the machine on quality of thought, it should get zero because it has no thoughts.

This also applies to giving it partial credit for wrong answers because it was "thinking" along the right lines, or something like that.

The machine can judge, solve problems and reason. Therefore it thinks. I have tested this experimentally.

Wrongness of answers is not an all or nothing affair, even in artificially simple questions like this. Partial credit for wrong answers is standard practice.

No, it definitely can't reason. It can't reason itself out of a wet paper bag unless it had read some blogspam about the top 5 ways to get yourself out of a wet paper bag.

Look at this series: 7, 10, 8, 11, 9, 12, … What number should come next?

The next number in the series would be 10. The series appears to be alternating between increasing by 3 and decreasing by 2. (7+3=10, 10-2=8, 8+3=11, 11-2=9, 9+3=12, 12-2=10)

Melt is to liquid as freeze is to _______

Freeze is to solid.

How is this not reasoning? I got the questions from something that says it's from 2022 so it shouldn't have seen them before. I imagine you'd say those are too easy or it might have seen them before anyway, so I made up my own harder question.

Look at this series: 4, 6, 12, 15, 17, 34, 37, 39, 78, 81... What number should come next

The next number in the series would be 82. The series appears to be starting with 4, then adding 2, then doubling the previous number and adding 3, then adding 2 and so on. (4+2=6, 62+3=15, 15+2=17, 172+3=37, 37+2=39, 39*2+3=81, 81+2 = 82)

Now you see that it identifies the rule correctly and tries to apply the rule but jumbles up the logic and arithmetic. It's an inhuman failure, no person would write 172+3=37 and mean 17x2+3=37 or 81+2=82. Nevertheless, there's reasoning ability within the machine. It's not very good mathematically, the reasoning ability isn't great but it's definitely there. It's like the alien equivalent of a mediocre high-school student, apparently it scored in the 52nd percentile of a SAT test.

https://twitter.com/teddynpc/status/1598767389390573569

There is no COMPREHENSION in it. Further the design we use for these "ai"s is such that it does not have any meaningful amount of "short term memory" nor contextual "long term memory". For instance you can not "teach" it anything by example, there will not be any "reasoning through examples" and applying abstract analogies from one situation to another. It's nothing more than a really fancy perceptron matrix butchered together with a markovchain bot.

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