Epstein Secrets

ans think creatively, computers do not. * ‘The process of understanding and communication is complex, much more complex than the digital theorems of Claude Shannon and Harry Nyquist. « Understanding is hard. « The communication of understanding is even harder. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015687 CONTENTS Preface

day, holds the record for the highest chess ranking ever achieved. Some consider him one of the most intelligent people on the planet. His opponent, Deep Blue, is a massively parallel chess-playing computer built by IBM’s Watson Research Laboratory. The machine itself sits a few blocks north of the tourname

n Turing wondered what it would take for machines to become intelligent. John von Neumann wondered what it would take for machines to self-reproduce. Claude Shannon wondered what it would take for machines to communicate reliably, no matter how much noise intervened. Norbert Wiener wondered how long it wo

e and evaluate a vast selection of possible future moves. But the majority of predictions of AI, e.g., robotic maids, turned out to be illusory. When Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, the most 20 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016823 powerful room-cleaning robot was a Roomba, which moved around vacuuming a

, “A Scientist Rebels,” Zhe Atlantic Monthly, January 1947. 31 Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in Claude Shannon & Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1949), p. 8 (emphasis in original). Shan

Machines were simply faster at doing brute-force calculations, had prodigious amounts of memory, and were not prone to errors. One article described Deep Blue’s victory not as that of a computer, which was just a dumb machine, but as the victory of hundreds of programmers over Kasparov, a single individual.

n Turing wondered what it would take for machines to become intelligent. John von Neumann wondered what it would take for machines to self-reproduce. Claude Shannon wondered what it would take for machines to communicate reliably, no matter how much noise intervened. Norbert Wiener wondered how long it wo

e and evaluate a vast selection of possible future moves. But the majority of predictions of AI, e.g., robotic maids, turned out to be illusory. When Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, the most 20 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016240 powerful room-cleaning robot was a Roomba, which moved around vacuuming a

, “A Scientist Rebels,” Zhe Atlantic Monthly, January 1947. 31 Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in Claude Shannon & Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1949), p. 8 (emphasis in original). Shan

Machines were simply faster at doing brute-force calculations, had prodigious amounts of memory, and were not prone to errors. One article described Deep Blue’s victory not as that of a computer, which was just a dumb machine, but as the victory of hundreds of programmers over Kasparov, a single individual.