Robert Schanks, AI-theoretist and head of a company named Engines for Education, and author of
Teaching Minds, would argue that the famous cliché of Science Fiction, humanoid, intelligent robots, will never exist. He argues that the term Artificial Intelligence is hopelessly misleading, and that a machine that has been build to play damn good Chess or Go, just fulfills the purpose it was constructed for, and does right that: it runs algorithms to play Chess or Go, nothing more. But a machine does not know what it knows, and it does not feel nor does it learn to form new interests by itself and educate itself to explore these interests. There are vacuum-cleaners that work okay, there are cleaners that work lousy, and there are cleaners that excel in the function of a vacuum-cleaner. But they remain to be just that: vacuum-cleaners. A good chess or go machine has no knowledge about itself, nor does it form any form of awareness. Schanks mocks the yearly tests of the Turing competition, and calls the results there "hilarious". A machine will never come up with questions it has formed up itself, it will only raise such questions it was programmed to form when certain preconditions are met. Schanks compares that to the learning process of children - and the chaos and total surprise they can ambush adults with. The result of that comparison is - there is no comparison possible, the mere concept of wanting to compare children and machines, is absurd.
I think the same can and must be concluded about this desperate attempt to still compare the functioning of the human brain to that of a computer. Not only is that not especially desirable - what could be gained by a human brain functioning like a computer? - but both things are so totally different that the mere attempt to compare a brain to a computer and form an analogy there, deserves laughter. As David Deutsch, physicist in Oxford, put it: "There is not a single brain in the world that knows what brains actually are doing. "
Still, a vacuum-cleaner excelling at what it does, is impressive in so far as that it cleans excellently, and a chess software that plays at grand master level is impressive in what it does, too. Regarding Go, it is a very different game, harder to calculate especially in the early game when the board is empty, you need more strategic "intuition" than causal tactics there, and thus it was much more difficult to code a software that really can play smart Go. Chess has more structures especially in the opening. The variation tree of Go outclasses that of chess in size and diversion. It is impressive that we can build machines and write software for them that now achieves these things. And if we do understand that this machine is not doing more and nothing less than this: running a chess or Go program, we can nevertheless admire the human creativity and skill behind building these things. Even if a vacuum-cleaner will never ask us why we do not clean the household ourselves while it goes on vacation in Italy.
And no, it was not easy at all to form this machine and software, Betonov. Not by a long mile.
Of the great games of mankind, Backgammon, Chess and Go, Go was the last to be cracked open by the machines, and only years later.