Define child. 2 year old? 5 year old?
I have three kids and I can tell you that they wouldn't be able to do this reliably until probably age 5, and even then maybe.
I have three kids and I can tell you that they wouldn't be able to do this reliably until probably age 5, and even then maybe.
My 5 year old son was a monster at animal puzzles when he was 3, but we had thousands of hours with animal picture books, animal toys etc... from 4 months on.
Ironically, the problem that Dr. Hinton is attempting to solve could be characterized as being that ordinary CNNs have trouble learning what's most relevant in an image.
In that time period all of the brain infrastructure to do single shot/transfer learning at speed is developed. So showing a 10 year old a picture of an elephant with relevant label could probably be learned in a single shot. Not so with a 1 year old.
People basically ignore that it takes humans YEARS of 24/7 training on ungodly amounts of data to be able to do anything close to reliable inference on even the most basic of tasks. That's the point.
Said more clearly, I am all but certain that the logical/mathematical process of correlating identifiable and measurable attributes through iterative search is the correct approach to reach general intelligence goals.
There are many improvements in efficiency, both in data acquisition, labeling, processing etc... that will need to happen make it tractable computationally, but fundamentally I think it's the correct approach.
Where I differ from Hinton is that he seems to think that human level processing requires less data than I believe it does. It's a subtle point actually.
It's true though that we can generalise from descriptions and recognise the real thing from those. If you describe an elephant as a big grey animal with big ears and a trunk they can use to grab stuff, then an adult (not a 2 year old I suspect) seeing one for the first time, will recognise it from that description.
When we see a cartoonish drawing of one, we can still distill the defining characteristics from it and use it to create a description or recognise the real thing. We can recognise a very crude childish drawing of one by looking for these characteristics. We have a lot of additional knowledge that influences our image recognition, and having a big toolbox of general recognition of tons of different objects, we don't really need to train to recognise new objects anymore, because we will distill its identifying characteristics the first time we see it.
Computers clearly don't look like that.
So, while this pattern in particular doesn't apply to humans (it really doesn't?), many animals have ready-to-use pattern recognition when they are just hours or days old.