Francois Chollet: prediction

Transcript context

…If you can do this for every single thing that supposedly requires intelligence, then what good is intelligence? Apparently, you can just brute force intelligence. If the world, if your life, were a static distribution then sure, you could just brute force the space of possible behaviors. There are several metaphors for intelligence I like to use. One is that you can think of intelligence as a pathfinding algorithm in future situation space. I don't know if you're familiar with RTS game development. You have a map, a 2D map, and you have partial information about it. There is some fog of war on your map. There are areas that you haven't explored yet. You know nothing about them. There are also areas that you've explored but you only know what they were like in the past. You don't know how they are like today. Now, instead of thinking about a 2D map, think about the space of possible future situations that you might encounter and how they're connected to each other. Intelligence is a pathfinding algorithm. Once you set a goal, it will tell you how to get there optimally. Of course, it's constrained by the information you have. It cannot pathfind in an area that you know nothing about. It also cannot anticipate changes. If you had complete information about the map, then you could solve the pathfinding problem by simply memorizing every possible path, every mapping from point A to point B. You could solve the problem with pure memory. The reason you cannot do that in real life is because you don't actually know what's going to happen in the future. Life is ever changing. I feel like you're using words like “memorization,” which we would never use for human children. If your kid learns to do algebra and then learns to do calculus, you wouldn't say they've memorized calculus. If they can solve any arbitrary algebraic problem, you wouldn't say they've memorized algebra. You’d say they've learned algebra.…

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