Bob Higgins <[email protected]> wrote: That is the problem with the work of Futurists - many of the massive > changes in our lives comes from seminal inventions whose timing cannot be > predicted. Once that seminal invention is proved, progress from > engineering can be rapid, or can be slow, but it usually moves forward. I > think LENR is still in need of at least some seminal understanding that is > presently missing. >
Definitely it needs this! I believe AI is in a similar state of waiting for that seminal invention > that makes AI practical. > I think the breakthrough has already come. In the last few years, tremendous progress has been made with multilevel neural networks. This technique that made it possible for a computer to beat the world's best go player, and it has recently had a tremendous impact on Google translate, making it far more like a human translator. This all happened in the last several months. Neural networks were proposed in the 1950s. A lot of work was done on them in the 1960s, but not much progress was made. Computers back then were not powerful enough to implement an effective version of these networks. I think they had roughly as much computing power as an insect brain. The biggest computers today have roughly as much power as a bird or mouse brain. This article shows an interesting animation: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/robots-artificial-intelligence-jobs-automation Scroll down to where it says, "how long until computers have the same power as the human brain?" They are predicting this will happen around the year 2025. As I said, modern neural networks are multilevel, meaning one network interfaces to another, which goes to another, and so on. This is called a deep neural network. The original networks were single level. This does not work anywhere near as well. The program that won at go has billions of individual decision points (artificial neurons), as I recall, in two main deep networks, policy and value. Twenty years ago, it would have taken weeks or months to run such a gigantic program. https://gogameguru.com/i/2016/03/deepmind-mastering-go.pdf https://www.tastehit.com/blog/google-deepmind-alphago-how-it-works/ - Jed
