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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

You have to respect Chomsky, but he certainly comes off like a curmudgeon here. He can't even be bothered to clearly explain his lack of interest in Watson.

It seems less like lack of interest than anger at what he sees as a misguided approach. I think he thinks that Watson and Deep Blue are "brute force" solutions (hence the steamroller metaphor), while his work on the relation of computation and grammar (and the vision guy he mentioned) actually get at the core of intelligence.

He may think there is a small elegant machine in the brain that understands grammar, and which is of course computational. He may be right but Watson is still interesting for any reasonably curious person. It's not obvious how much brute force you need to play Jeopardy.

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I find it curious why so many people think that there is a small and elegant machine in the brain. In terms of brute force computation, the brain is still far, far in the lead. It has so many neural connections that we are not even close to simulating it yet.

Given that, assuming that it implements some small and elegant algorithm is a very strange assumption to make.

Chomsky's work again and again focuses on how language develops given the paucity of data (linguistic examples) the child is exposed to--Watson and Google Translate (according to Norvig's NY Post article) both rely on orders of magnitude more data.

Brute force is a good approach given our current technology and understanding, but it isn't necessarily similar to the brain.

But the brain appears to be tuned for language. And also that the brain also gets two years of training before the first words really appear. And its probably 8 years before it can parse with Jeopardy style questions.

I don't think anyone thinks they're meant to be similar. It's not neurobiology, it's computer science.

Is there any evidence that the computation in the human brain is not in fact "brute force"?

I think this is an excellent question. What is brute force anyway, but a perspective of scale? Take any complex system, break it down enough, and it starts to look like brute force.

How is deep blue playing Jeopardy anything more than eliza + google search?

The steamroller metaphor is intended to illustrate the brute force aspect of the approach. Google + deep blue burns many many orders of magnitude more calories than a human.

There is a fundamental difference between Deep Blue and Watson: Deep Blue truly did just do a brute force search of a decision tree. Watson does not. It employs machine learning techniques to find correlations between words in the questions and words in its (enormous) data store.

Yes, Watson is brute force compared to a human brain. But Watson is still fundamentally different than the brute-force approach of traversing decision trees of a well-defined rule set.

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."

-- Arthur C. Clarke

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