I disagree. There are educated guesses. Wild guesses. And good guesses.
Chuck, don't know how learned you are in antiquities. But what would be your
answer to the question of a word that's synonymous with "teacher", but in
actualitu it's origin was the name of a literary character from 2500 years ago.
It may or may not help to mention it's from Homer's Odyssey. If you sidn't
outright know the amswer, could you make a good guess? Would you take a wild
guess? There is in actuality a data set, as in english there are a dinite
number of synonyms for teacher. But a person may not be aware of all the
possibilities, so that becomes irrelevant.
It seems at this point that AI can only look shit up. I don't doubt that
eventually these things will learn how to reason to whatever degree. But this
point won't be reached until the damned things can make food guesses. But so
much bullshit is being programmed into these things already, in the ways they
are taught how to think, I really have to believe we're all going to need
bunkers before long.
On Tuesday, January 17, 2023, 11:56:46 AM EST, Chuck Guzis via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 1/16/23 22:23, Chris via cctalk wrote:
> But which of those constitutes guessing? The computer would likely have
>beaten me to the answer by at least a second :). It's easy enough to look up,
>for a computer that is. But in that instance a computer wouldn't need to
>guess. And for me, there were no multiple choices. It was hardly an educated
>guess - I never read the friggin book as I was supposed to! (the Odyssey). But
>the answer was a word I was familiar with from childhood, never actually
>knowing what it's origin was (mentor).
>
"Guessing" is nothing more than an estimate of the likely answer based
on an incomplete dataset. If you had, for example, no dataset at all,
"Blueberries" would be as good a guess as any to every question.
--Chuck
