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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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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.