Richard Hamming on Artificial Intelligence (1995) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Richard Hamming on Artificial Intelligence (1995) [video]

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83 pointsbeshrkayali8 comments

As an informal observation, one of the best parts about older professors was that they avoid the extreme nuance that some of the younger professors and TAs get into. Although that can be interesting also, I feel as if it sometimes misses the bigger picture.

Older lecturers have had a lifetime to think about their problem domain and are often able to convey things very clearly and un-confrontationally. They aim to challenge you rather than defeat you. They are also less concerned with proving themselves and thus are generally more willing to lecture about things that are more in line with their true beliefs and aren't just designed to make them look smart. It's hard to put into words I suppose what makes talks like these so great.

On another note: this was basically a philosophy lecture which I think is great.

His book "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers" is brilliant, his work included information theory, sampling, and running bell labs during its most productive time. He wasn't a professor, he was a giant.

I also very much recommend "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering", which is mostly philosophical but has quite a few partial differential equations in it.

Available as a complete pdf here: http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn...

It's been posted here before, but Hamming's talk "You and Your Research" is one for the ages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

Hamming passed in 1998, this talk was given about three years earlier. So much sage advice as compiled over a very long and fruitful career.

My father went to this talk, and speaks glowingly about Hamming.

I hear him give this talk at NASA Ames in the early 80s. It had a huge influence on me.

A second major difficulty is your religion. And you have different religions. The question of religion, you have man created god, sorry, god created man in his image

Hahaha that was one of the most beautiful Freudian Slips I ever had the joy of witnessing.

That aside, the philosophical introduction seems mediocre, those are questions you naturally come up with all by yourself if you use computers.

As much as I love Hamming's work like Hamming codes, I am not a fan of his lectures (it is not the first one I've started watching either).

One of the issues of thought is that its like a machine learning ruleset but by the time we are of age to contemplate how our own conscious thinking works, the whole thing is nearly undecipherable to the subjective self. Hamming describes well, we do what we do. Machines do what they do. Now if strict rules are followed, wheres the thought?

At a strictly information theoretic approach to intelligence, I think we can agree that decision making is the atom of intelligent life or intelligent machines. Since consciousness is (insert spiritual uptick here) but moreso a geometric effect, ie. Every being feels their conscious space somewhere in their body (most likely the head.) the only individuality one can really find is of experience, and therefore memory, and therefore ammo for decision rules.

Quantum physics also is nice in that it allows for any possible physical arrangement for the next moment in spacetime, although the highly unlikely physical interactions are well...unlikely.

So if "destiny" of a human being is quantum effects in both the brain and reality providing randomness. And birth and body providing genetics, epigenetics, a starting ruleset. The closest we can come to crediting ourselves as decision makers, is that we follow pretty logical Darwinian-evolved logic. And quantum physics lets us add the outliers and the absolute exclusion set of programming as a reality. I like to see free will as (well at least the experience is not controlled by anyone else) hey..randomness is a free spirit. Physics, nature, "The Great Animator" might not even possess knowledge of the future because of quanta. Its also an implication for time travel, if quanta are reversed, the they may flatten to different bits. Ride the wave! :-)

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