Mar 12, 2007
KASPAROV AND DEEP BLUE
by Tim Dees
It was roughly ten years ago that the final Kasparov-Deep Blue match took place. If you don't remember, that match was the second of two matches that pitted the world's greatest chess player against an IBM supercomputer, nicknamed Deep Blue. In the first match, the computer put up a strong challenge, but eventually crumpled.
The second match, however, went quite differently. The IBM programmers made demands that Kasparov found tough to accept, such as the ability to tweak Deep Blue's software between games. Kasparov eventually relented. During the match, Kasparov noticed that the computer was making moves of exceptional creativity and originality. He had never seen a computer make such moves before. He accused the programmers of cheating, either by using a human to make some moves, or by reprogramming Deep Blue in mid-game. To prove they were cheating, Kasparov asked to see the log files. The programmers refused.
To this day, Kasparov maintains that the Deep Blue programming team swindled him. But the more interesting thing is that both Kasparov's earlier win and later loss against Deep Blue demonstrates something profound about the human mind.
When a programmer teaches a computer to play chess, he essentially has it analyze every possible board state. So it takes every possible move and analyzes it based on the fallout from that move. This takes enormous processing power. That's why Deep Blue had to be a supercomputer, and that's why computers have gotten better at chess as they've gotten faster. But the human mind works nothing like that. The brain has nowhere near the processing power to compute trillions of possible board states. So it must be playing by some other system, and a system that is far smarter than anything we've come up with on a computer.
There are other games, however, for which we understand how the brain works. Backgammon, for instance. In backgammon, a computer that uses the same processes that Deep Blue used (looking at each possible board state given trillions of possible moves) will lose to a below-average player consistently. In the 1970s, however, computer scientists started using neural networks to play backgammon. Neural networks are systems that work very much like neurons in the brain. After using the neural network programming, the machine was still terrible at backgammon. But then the programmers tried something different: they allowed the computer to play a few hundred games to train the neural network to play the game. After that, the computer could handle even the best opponent.
Neural networks can run on slow computers (like the brain), so computers have gotten no better at backgammon since the '70s. But neural networks have been unsuccessful at playing chess. So we're still left wondering what's going on in Kasparov's brain.
Comments Requested - I would love your thoughts on the relationship of brains to computers, and the differences between minds, consciousness and computational machines. Also, if anyone has knowledge of pattern recognition vs. sequential processing, that would be cool as well.
Comments
One of the discontinuities that is less talked about in neuroscience and more discussed in philosophy of mind is the content of thoughts.
Computers and the human mind are vastly different, not because each makes computations, but because the human mind actually has meaning and content behind its calculations.
A computer is merely code or if-then statements. But only the human mind understands the meaning of an if-then statement.
What troubles me about how neuroscience has influenced popular culture is the way scientific discoveries create vastly inappropriate meanings when it comes to things like reading the mind (equivocating that a c-fiber firing is identical to, say, thinking of a sandwich).
What troubles me, in addition, are movies made to reflect this thinking. We believe movies like "I, Robot" are given to show the human-like status of a machine. But in reality it is going in the back-door and wrongly teaching us the machine-like status of a human.
We forget how incompatible this is with the soul, evidences for the soul, and sucks the humanness out of the humanities.
Posted by: Dale Fincher | March 13, 2007 01:29 PM
Hey guys, the following is a short segment from a paper I wrote supporting a mind/body dualism conjoined in pschosomaitc unity...it hits some of the "mind=brain=a meat machine=computer" ideas...apologies as i did not have time to pull all the footnotes over here in to this comment. The whole paper is at The Resurgence
Much has been written on the phislosophical reasons to support dualism, most recently by various Christian philosophers. To develop these arguments with rigor would go beyond the scope of this paper and delve deeply into contemporary philosophy of mind; so for our purposes only a cursory look will be given, though the arguments are complex and multifaceted. These arguments follow largely from evangelical philosopher JP Moreland’s early work Scaling the Secular City – A Defense of Christianity. Moreland frames a defense of dualism along the following lines. First, he argues that mental and physical properties are not identical. In other words, our thoughts, though they be correlative to brain functions, they are not brain functions in themselves. My thought of a certain ball may be “pink” but there is nothing in my brain which is pink. The mental event (the thought) and the physical apparatus have different properties and therefore cannot be identical. Second, individuals have personal access to their own thoughts and a direct experience of consciousness. Subjective, first person awareness, motions of volition, and moral decisions are difficult to explain in physicalist terms. Indeed, Christian physicalists are quick to attempt to define their physicalism as nonreductive in order to maintain higher level phenomena (usually such things ethics, spirituality and free will) which do not reduce to the mere bumping of atoms and electrochemical reactions. If such higher level experiences actually reduce to physics, then our experience of a consciousness subjective self which makes decisions and judgments is mere illusion. A final argument about the nature of human beings being dualistic in nature is the persistence of the self over time. Philosophers as far back as David Hume have wrestled with the concept of the persistence of personal identity across time and contemporary physicalists should have their doubts as well. If the physicalist depiction of human nature is true, then one is simply the make up of his body. One of the fascinating things we have learned about the human body is that it is constantly replenishing its cells over time and is quite literally a different body over the course of our lives. The natural question we must ask then is how one persists as the same person. If the reply is that the person in question is simply an organized pattern supervening upon matter, then the materialist is smuggling in a persistent non-physical entity to keep the idea of personal identity alive through subsequent cellular cycles. The physicalist knows there is something that persists – for she asks a person to change his mind about his dualism, will hold others responsible for crimes committed in the past, and would require a person to repay his debts in the future. However, if phyiscalism is literally true, the person of the past no longer exists and cannot be held accountable. This of course is absurd. For all our human interactions demand someone persist into the future that we may identify as the same person. If it is a non-physical pattern, and emerging conscious self that obtains even through complete recycling of the body, the physicalist is asking for a free lunch which metaphysically she has no rights to eat. Although just a small cursory view, it is noted that there is strong contemporary philosophical support for the dualist position.
Perhaps the strongest objection to the dichotomist position is from the monist arguing for a phyiscalist interpretation of the mind. With recent advancements in localization studies where certain thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are localized to certain parts of the brain many hold that dualism is now redundant for we see the seat of the mind playing out in the physical brain. To have an additional soul is unnecessary and redundant as we can explain all behavior by way of brain functionality. This argument, although evidentially forceful to a materialist, in no way disproves the dualist position. As stated earlier, the holistic dualist in no way denies a correlation between mental events and brain functioning. The problem the dualist sees is the leap to mind/bring identity. Christian apologist Greg Koukl offers an excellent distinction by way of illustration:
…That’s like saying that a movie is nothing more than light shining through a piece of celluloid. A movie requires light shining through a piece of celluloid and then you can see it projected on the screen. But to say that it is nothing more than that misses something very obvious. Did you ever go upstairs in a movie theater and look through the window of the projection room? There is a big giant disc spinning, the celluloid goes through an apparatus, and there is hot light. Now, what if I were to tell you that that is the movie right there. The movie is a physical action that I can see happening. You’d think that was ridiculous. A movie is much more than a physical mechanism…Rather, the movie is the image that is being projected on the screen, and it’s even more than just an image. There is a story, dialogue, characterization. There are all these other things that go beyond just the physical representation.
The holistic dualist will cordially grant that thoughts play out in the medium of the body and that the body certainly has bearing upon the soul. Therefore brain localization studies should not give the dualist pause as such correlation between thoughts and the medium for such thoughts is expected. One final objection from the physicalist arises from recent advances in computer technology and artificial intelligence. The argument is that we will shortly simulate consciousness and even spirituality with machines and therefore proving that consciousness requires no true spiritual nature. At this point I will just reference the debate on Strong AI, and note that the debate is far from conclusive on whether the grand claims of these new technologists and philosophers are even remotely valid.
Note on Strong AI - John Searle defines Strong AI as follows: According to strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind. John R Searle, "Minds Brains and Programs.," in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
See the essays in Ray Kurzweil, ed., Are We Spiritual Machines - Ray Kurzweil Vs. The Critics of Strong A.I. (Seatle: Discovery Institute, 2002).
Posted by: Reid Monaghan | March 14, 2007 09:45 AM